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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright No. 



SM1___ZZ2 



._, 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



MORE "COPY" 



A SECOND SERIES OF 



ESSAYS FROM AN EDITOR'S DRAWER 



ON 



Religion, Literature and Life 



B Y|/ / 

HUGH MILLER THOMPSON, D.D. 

Bishop of Mississippi 



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NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE 

1897 







,TS£ 



Copyright, 1897, by 
Thomas Whittaker. 



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PUBLISHER'S NOTE. 

IN 1872 — now a quarter of a century ago — some essays from 
an editor's drawer on religion, literature, and life, written by 
Hugh Miller Thompson, were gathered in book form. The title 
" Copy " was given to the volume. In explanation it was said : 
"An editor writes under spur. The^printer cries ' Copy! ' and 
'copy' must come." Confession was made as to hasty writing 
sometimes when the call for " copy " was urgent, but there was 
-an absolute refusal to plead guilty to hasty thinking. 

The book was received with warmest appreciation. Its sturdy 
good sense was commended, as well as the directness and bril- 
liancy of its style. The book has lived ; it is read to-day, and 
will be read through many coming years. 

For some time past there has been a call for " More copy." 
The question has been asked, " Are there not in existence other 
essays of Bishop Thompson, which are equally valuable, equally 
full of vigorous life? " It has been found that there are such 
essays, and the publisher has been made glad by this knowledge. 

For " More ' Copy ' " indebtedness is chiefly due to Mrs. W. T. 
Howe, a daughter who lives with the good bishop and has access 
to his drawers. It has been humorously suggested that " Rob- 
bing a Bishop," or "A Daughter's Larceny," would be an ap- 
propriate title for the present volume ; but, on the whole, " More 
' Copy ' " has been preferred. 

There are thousands who valued the first " Copy " so much 
that they want more, and as much as they can get. This " More 
' Copy ' " is herewith given. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Church and Sects— I. 17 

Church and Sects— II. 24 

Temptation: Its Meaning 31 

A Bit op Thought 37 

The Engineer 39 

Slavery op Sin 42 

The Use op Ritualism 48 

Restitution 50 

A House Divided 55 

Ignorance and Thoughtlessness 58 

Makeshifts 62 

The Sunday-school Idea 66 

11 Ye of Little Faith ! " 72 

Euthanasia and the Scientists 75 

exclusiveness of the church ■ . .81 

Religion Left Behind 85 

The Church and Working People 89 

The Power of Dullness 94 

Obscure Millionaires 99 

A Time of Work 102 

A Passed Fashion . . . 108 

The Pope as an Insurance Company . . . . . 113 

Fifty Millions 116 

Services in Houses 121 

Bits of Thought ...» 121 



Contents. 

PAGE 

The New Time 126 

About Some Points in the Pastoral Care .... 130 

Worth Considering 134 

Giving 136 

The Drift . 137 

About Discipline 141 

Praying for the World's Conversion .... 146 

Church and Sects Again 151 

Do We Need It? 157 

Artificial Moralities 163 

"Lawyers and Christianity" 167 

Pastoral Work 170 

The Sermon Trade 177 

A Danger and a Weakness ... . . , . . 182 

The Tenement-house 189 

"How shall We Reach the Masses?" 195 

Frankenstein 202 

The Quadrennial Spasm 208 

Parrots and Phrases 213 

A Duty Shirked 217 

Building and Arming Forts 221 

Recovery 228 

Religion and Godliness 235 

Common Sense Needed 240 



I. 

CHURCH AND SECTS. 

VI7HAT price is Christian Unity worth ? 

" " Any price, we answer, short of the sacrifice of principle. 

That is the measure to guide us. 

Any Churchman, who knows the nature of the Church and her 
business here, will answer as we have — anything for Christian 
Unity short of the sacrifice of Christian Truth. 

For so shameful are our divisions, so utterly disgraceful and dis- 
gusting in the face of rampant worldliness and sin, and especially 
in the face of a world four to one heathen yet, that it is no longer 
possible for any man, not sold to some deluding cheat (like John 
Calvin's " Invisible Church," which is all one, though split into 
two hundred fragments, a greater contradiction than even Leo the 
Third's Transubstantiation Invention !), to hope for any progress 
in Christianity, any advance in the Kingdom of Heaven, till the 
curse is removed. 

We have said there are two things — they are distinct enough — 
the Faith and the Church's methods of propagating and teaching 
the Faith — Doctrine and Discipline. 

The first is out of the Church's hands. It is the deposit from 
above. She is only a trustee for it. 

The other is absolutely, under the guidance of the Divine Wis- 
dom which she has the right always prayerfully to claim, in her 
own bands to deal with as she sees best for her needs. 

We put the first, therefore, out of the question. Indeed, it does 
not come practically into the question at all. The mass of sects 
are not heretics. They hold the deposit of the Faith; at leastthey 
mean to. The few who do not may practically be counted out of 
the question. They are not numerous enough to suggest, if all the 
rest were one, a division among Christians. 
2 (17) 



18 Chitech and Sects. 

It remains then that discipline is the matter on which we have 
the right and power to propose terms of reunion. That is the 
Church's own department to conduct according to the exigencies 
of times and occasions. The forms and modes of worship, the 
outward guise and manner of the priesthood, the ceremonial serv- 
ices which clothe the Sacraments — all these are in the Church's 
power. 

She may love them and prize them. She may consider them 
wisest and best. They may be so without a question. She may 
enforce their observance on those within her with all the might of 
her authority, because she has deliberately established them, and 
her children should submit, for the wisdom of the whole is wiser 
than the conceit of one, or a score, or even seventy and two. But, 
should the question come in the shape of a relaxation, or abroga- 
tion even, of some of them, that schism may be healed and the 
knots of peace and love be knit among Christian people, we hum- 
bly submit that "too much stiffness in refusing" is not wisdom. 

Such stiffness, now at least, is a little out of place in the Ameri- 
can Church. Her purpose is to conciliate, heal and unite. Stiff- 
ness and strong refusals are means to that purpose. She is pledged, 
by the demands of her place, to gentleness and the temper that 
yields in all things but truth. 

We do not know that the time has come for any marked influ- 
ence yet upon the outside. We are certain, however, that such 
time will come, and perhaps, so rapidly do events march, sooner 
than we expect. But our purpose in writing is to set ourselves in- 
side to considering, to prepare our own minds for the exigencies 
of the future. 

We submit our opinions with deference. We speak under cor- 
rection, and desire them to have only the weight that attaches 
from the reasons given. 

That millions in the land are strongly prejudiced against Litur- 
gic forms is the fact. They prefer to pray extempore. They con- 
sider, rightly or wrongly, (hat there is more of unci ion and pre- 
vailing earnestness in such prayers. We do not believe it. We 
are perfectly sure, they are entirely mistaken, and that an ac- 
quaintance with the better way would disgust them with extempore 
deliverances for good. 

But certainly, whether a man pray with a book or without a 
book, is no part of the Faith. It is, after all, a matter of disci- 



Church and Sects. 19 

pline, and though all ancient writers, and the Holy Scriptures 
themselves, are on the side of the discipline of a Liturgy, we do 
not doubt that the strongest Churchman will admit that the 
Church was just as much a Church before its elaborate Rituals 
were formed as it was afterward. 

While, therefore, we would not give up or seriously change our 
Liturgy, while the " Book of Common Prayer " would still remain 
as the standard and model of worship, and while it would be used 
in all Churches regularly served, as it is now, would it be any sac- 
rifice of principle to allow those who might come to us from with- 
out, provided they so desired, to use, at other times, in prayer 
meetings, missionary meetings, and such like, their own extempore 
gifts till the influence of the Prayer Book, working on them 
quietly, taught them a better way ? 

We instance this question because it has been largely the fashion 
to represent the Church as a sect, one of whose " distinctive doc- 
trines " is to pray by a book. The Churchman understands that 
the Prayer Book was made for the Church and not the Church 
for the Prayer Book, and that if the question is between dividing 
Christianity or allowing extempore prayers, there should be no long 
hesitation. 

Piiz ; ng the Book of Common Prayer as we do, as the next book 
to the Bible in the English tongue, we are not Prayer Bookolators, 
and would compromise even on that most precious jewel of the 
Church's crown, for the sake of unity with our brethren. 

But if there are those who are prejudiced in favor of extempore 
prayers, there are those more prejudiced in favor of coat-tails. At 
present the surplice is a good deal of a stumbling block to the 
sectarian mind. 

It thinks "the Episcopal sect " has a distinctive doctrine about 
wearing a piece of white linen ! Of course, it admits its right to 
have such a distinctive doctrine. It is quite according to sectarian 
experience that it should have. On about such issues have sects 
been formed before now, and will possibly continue to be. It 
would be news to the sectarian mind to tell it that we have no law 
about wearing the surplice at all ! 

If the surplice should turn out to be an objection we would 
make no sacrifice of principle in conforming with our brethren, 
anxious to unite, and allowing them to be officiated for in black 
coats, or even brown ones, should that color be more convenient. 



20 Church and Sects. 

In good time they would, as we have, without any law, take the 
surplice from a natural sense of the fitness of things. But we 
should certainly make no difficulty with them on that ground. 
The Kingdom of God consists not in garments. We Churchmen 
confess that as freely as anybody. And though we have a taste 
for fit and appropriate vestments in the House of God, we will 
not divide Christians, or give occasion to schism, by forcing our 
tastes on people whose education has been different. 

We have instanced these two things because they are striking 
and palpable as distinctions peculiar to us. They are in the 
Church's hands to deal with as she may wisely judge in the face 
of the question of uniting brethren, and if it depended on her to 
heal the divisions which are our burning shame, she would allow 
no taste or preference of hers to stand in the way. 

A Catholic Church must be large and liberal. She must allow 
free room for individual preferences under the law, not only for 
individual preferences in the matter of doctrinal appreciations, 
but for them also in that of Christian activities and works. 

It was so originally. It must be so again. In the early Church, 
as we know, such freedom existed. A sect cannot allow it. It is 
the very purpose of a sect to destroy individuality, to make every 
man cut his coat after the sect pattern. And as soon as anybody 
wants to cut his garments after another fashion, he must leave the 
sect and organize another whose coats shall all be like the model 
he has invented. The Primitive Church contained expressions 
and manifestations of individuality enough to furnish a couple of 
hundred modern sects with an outfit of distinctive principles " to 
last them each a century !" And yet that individuality and per- 
sonal preference lived and worked in the great bosom of the 
Catholic Church and created no division. 

It is one of the most noticeable characteristics of Catholicity in 
the American Church that she allows such large liberty of pri- 
vate preference under law. Herein is one broad difference be- 
tween her and the denominations about her. 

And yet she may, and, perhaps, ought to, carry this much 
farther than she has yet ventured. She must allow, in matters 
indifferent, the widest latitude of individual choice, and must be 
very liberal in what she is prepared to consider indifferent. A 
true Catholic Church will never try the preposterous absurdity of 
making all men think alike or act alike. She will be large enough 



Church and Sects. 21 

to find place for the most divergent tempers and opinions, so that 
all live beneath the law of Faith and Charity. 

Why, then, should it be impossible to permit, yea, even to wel- 
come, into the Church the different forms of activity and the dif- 
ferent methods of the Christian life which men find outside to be 
of use and good, and for the lack of which they misjudge the 
Church, as though her essential character consisted in refusing or 
forbidding them ? Why should they not all be allowed if people 
find them good, or even if they have but the good of old custom? 

Is it any essential of Catholicity to refuse the social " prayer 
meeting," a means of spiritual growth dear to many, and which 
the experience of good men in thousands has found a blessing ? 
Is the Church not large enough and strong enough and control- 
ling enough to welcome this or any like form of the development 
of the Christian life as a legitimate thing ? The Methodist need 
not stay out to have his " class meeting." We must not forget 
that the class meeting was organized and worked for half a cen- 
tury in the Church by Churchmen, and the highest sort of Church- 
men known. May we not assure our brethren outside when the 
time comes, that their class meetings need not be abandoned if 
they find them good for their souls? 

" But," we shall be answered, " with extempore prayers, with 
class meetings, with prayer meetings, with conferences, etc., what 
will become of the Church?" We answer, she will be just where 
she was before, holding the same Creeds, teaching the same Faith, 
having the same order, administering the same discipline. These 
things are all of the accidents. They are not of the essence of 
the Church. And the Church should be a field large enough to 
allow all right methods of cultivation and all forms of work 
which effect any good for the souls of men. 

"But if you would allow Prayer Meetings and Classes, must you 
not also allow Retreats and Oratories?" Why not, we ask again? 
What is there in a name to frighten men? Why should not all 
these be allowed and kept for good uses by the strong, controlling 
influence and spirit of the Church ? If men find themselves the 
better, if these things evidently sanctify men and bring them 
nearer to God, if they enkindle devotion and influence zeal, and 
save souls, why not ? 

Again we reach the fact that it is of the nature of the sect to 
train the plants in God's garden after one artificial fashion. It is 



22 Chukch and Sects. 

the nature of the Church to offer as large a variety in the king- 
dom of grace as God gives in the kingdom of nature. 

The oak is needed, so, also, is the lily. They may both grow 
together. We must not insist on making the oak a lily or the lily 
an oak. 

To change the figure, it is sectarianism pure and simple, to in- 
sist that God can be served in only one artificial method. It is of 
the essence of Catholic Christianity to see that He can be served 
acceptably in scores of methods, that even " they also serve who 
only stand and wait;" that the variety of service, as different as are 
those who serve, joins at last and makes the perfect harmony. 

Must we not grow up to see that it must come to this at last if 
unity ever comes at all ? That the unity meant, the unity alone 
possible, is a unity in diversity, a unity made out of multiplicity, 
and that the attempt to make a unity in sameness is just the rock 
on which Christianity has struck and broken ? 

We do believe that whenever the Church grows up to see this, 
and to take the broad ground, of which she is terribly afraid, 
there are waiting for her returning thousands, who in their secret 
hearts have been longing and waiting for this very thing, and 
have been unable, so far, to find it. 

We need to-day a variety of services which we do not possess. 
The need has been felt for long, and often expressed, and will be 
more and more expressed until we get it supplied. We need 
scores of methods and activities which we do not have. They 
should grow spontaneous from the life of a living Church. They 
did grow so, some of them, in the Church of England, and she 
threw them over the wall as weeds, and they rooted themselves 
in the best soil they could find. Is it not time that we unlearned 
the narrowness of the Establishment, and began to seek the free 
life and development of a free Church? "But for what good?" 
For the good of unity, the one good for which the world waits, 
and without which we are seeking to convert it without the Lord's 
promise. 

To bring it to the Christianity of America is our business. We 
sincerely believe we have been providentially put here for that 
work, and that in due time we shall see it, and set about it as the 
one thing, without which all other works are mere makeshifts. 
To see it and do it, we must get far away from the sectarianism 
of mere "Protestant Episcopalism," whether of the "low" type 



Church and Sects. 23 

or the " high" type, and must rise to something like faith in the 
American Church Catholic. 

But in the question of unity it may be said that, after all, these 
matters are not the main trouble. The difficulty, after all, lies in 
the position of the clergy of the various denominations, and how 
in any proposed step to unity we could deal with them. Even 
this is not so difficult as it may at first seem. We shall state our 
opinion of how that difficulty may be met in another paper. 



II. 

CHURCH AND SECTS. 

1THE most difficult question to deal with in the matter of any 
-*- possible unity between the Church and the denominations is 
the question of the ministry. 

The Church holds that " it is evident unto all men diligently 
reading Holy Scripture and ancient authors, that there hath always 
been these three Orders." That is to say, she holds to the Apos- 
tolic succession, as it is commonly called, that any man claiming 
to act for men in things pertaining to God must have a valid com- 
mission from the Lord Himself, who has sole right to give such 
authority ; that no man can take office of himself or exercise it on 
his own authority ; that it originated from above and not from 
below ; that it was conferred, once for all, personally by the Lord ; 
and that unless a man can trace his authority to that first and 
only commission, he has no business to take on himself or admit 
the authority of others to put on him the duty of preaching the 
Gospel and administering the Sacraments. 

And this doctrine lies, as we can see, at the root of the doctrine 
of unity, and is its essential complement and safeguard. If the 
power to act for men, in things divine, is a power which any body 
of men, self-appointed, can give him, then unity is at an end at 
once, and the notion that all Christians are to be one is a dream. 

They who hold this theory of ministerial appointment have 
been compelled, from the logic of their position, to deny that the 
Lord ever intended to, or ever did, found a Church which was to 
be one. They are compelled to accept the present disrupted state 
of Christianity, as we see it in America, as the normal and in- 
tended state, and make what defence of it they can. 

The Church, as the foundation of unity, has been forced, there- 
fore, to dwell, perhaps in too pertinacious a way, on what has 

(24) 



Church and Sects. 25 

appeared, to many, a matter of mere order. The "Apostolic suc- 
cession" has appeared to be her "distinctive doctrine." She has, 
as it seems to them, chosen this, of her own accord, as her sect 
standard. Perhaps it has not been thoroughly understood, by 
those within, that "the Apostolic succession" is only another 
name for Christian unity ; that it is simply another expression of 
the doctrine that the Church is divine and not human ; that men 
cannot make a Church any more than a Gospel or an Atone- 
ment; that Christ's Kingdom is not of this world, and that authority 
in that Kingdom is conferred solely by Him ; that, therefore, there 
can never be but one Church, and that any body claiming to be a 
part of that Church must link itself historically to the Church He 
founded. 

But, indeed, so strong is the natural feeling in favor of the 
Church's view and doctrine, that all bodies, let their theories be 
what they may, act upon it, and take for granted some sort of 
" succession," and insist on some form of ecclesiastic descent. 

The Congregationalists, of all kinds, theoretically hold that the 
people's choice and recognition make a minister. Practically, 
the people have nothing to do with the matter, and accept the 
minister sent them without pretence that they have given him his 
authority. Their clergy are ordained as ours are, by other clergy- 
men, and the congregation never dream that they have the right 
to reject that ordination; indeed, that they ought to reject it, and 
make a true Congregational one of their own. 

Now any body that adopts the practice of allowing or requiring 
the ordination of one clergyman by others ; that refuses to accept 
a man among the clergy unless other clergymen have laid their 
hands upon him, is, we need scarcely say, as much bound to some 
Apostolic succession as we are. For, manifestly, if A is not a 
valid minister unless B, already a minister, lays hands upon him, 
then B is not unless C laid hands on him, nor C unless he was 
ordained by D, and so on to the end of the alphabet. If there is 
ever a breach till one gets to the Apostles, then the line is snap- 
ped, and we have X ordained by Y, a layman, who had no au- 
thority to ordain at all, and the line comes to nothing. 

The Presbyterians are plainly bound, by their standards and 
their practice, and all bodies of Lutherans, to the doctrine and 
principle of Apostolic succession in some shape. Indeed we 
believe they differ only from the Church in claiming that the 



26 Church and Sects. 

succession comes through Presbyters and not through Bishops, 
and therefore they are called Presbyterians. 

The Methodists are quite as strict about their "succession," such 
as it is, as we are ourselves. They ordain Deacons, Eiders and 
" Bishops" by separate ordinations, and the man that ordains is 
always a " Bishop." Ordination is one of his reserved functions. 

They trace their "succession," as is well known, to Dr. Thomas 
Coke, an ambitious and restless and rather untrustworthy man, 
who came over to America and set up for a Bishop, and after- 
wards, frightened at what he had done, wrote to Bishops White 
and Seabury, begging them to ordain him a real Bishop. So mis- 
erable was the condition of discipline in the Church of England 
at the time, that this man, who would now be tried and degraded 
for his impostures, was allowed to die a presbyter of that Church, 
intriguing to the last to be made, if possible, a genuine Bishop 
somewhere. Nevertheless, our Methodist brethren, as their "Dis- 
cipline" shows, are very strict on the matter of the " succession," 
and have taken great pains to keep it as genuine as it was when 
they first made it. 

But all these " successions," Methodist, Presbyterian, Congrega- 
tional, or what not, the Church ignores. They are all alike breaches 
of unity, sprung of schism and division, and set up to justify them. 

Clergymen coming to her from any of these bodies she treats 
as laymen. She admits them to no office of the ministry without 
ordination. If they seek her ministry she begins the whole mat- 
ter de novo, and ordains the oldest of them, after due probation, a 
deacon, and, in due time, a priest. We have received a large 
number of the ministers of various denominations in this way, 
some who have done good service, and some who, perhaps, did 
the body they left far more good by the change than they did the 
Church. We shall receive, in time to come, many more. It is 
natural enough that our most frequent accessions, proportionately 
from the ranks of our brethren outside, should be from their min- 
istry. The clergy are, of course, the most reading and intelligent 
class among them, theologically. Their studies lead them to test 
their own ground most frequently, and they are led, by study, to 
doubt the validity of their position. We should be ready to wel- 
come them if they are fit, to encourage their tendency toward us 
by all proper means. Every time one of them comes among us 
there is a stride toward unity, one wound of schism is healed. 



Church and Sects. 27 

Perhaps we have not considered what these men have to give 
up, how great the sacrifice they have to make. 

The Church preserves a rigid and unbending attitude. She 
makes no movement, takes no step, removes no obstacle. Is it 
quite right? Is it just the position for a body that prays and 
works for unity among Christian men ? 

In what we are going to say we scarcely think it possible we 
shall be misunderstood. None can hold more firmly than our- 
selves to the doctrine of the Preface to the Ordinal. None can be 
more convinced of the essential need of an Apostolic authority to 
qualify a man for the ministry of Christ's Church. And it is just 
because we so hold and are so convinced, that we think it high 
time the American Church made the conferring of that authority, 
upon such as desire to have a ministry about whose validity they 
are in doubt, less hard and bitter. 

Here is a man who has exercised his ministry in some denomi- 
nation five, ten, or twenty years, perhaps a quarter of a century. 
He has seen the fruits of that ministry, men brought to repentance 
and faith and the profession of Christ's name. He has known 
souls blessed by his ministry, not a few, and he thanks God for it. 
Divine Grace has evidently worked with his efforts. God has 
blessed the words of his lips and the meditations of his heart to the 
salvation of men. He has had, through all those years, the wit- 
ness of the Holy Spirit, to the efficacy of his ministry. It has, in- 
deed, not been all he wished. 

Towards the last, perhaps, he has been disturbed by doubts, and 
is now looking in a Churchly direction for something of assurance 
and stability. But his work, as scores can testify whom God has 
blessed, has not been in vain. He has brought comfort to the af- 
flicted. He has blessed the house of mourning by his ministry. 
He has pointed the dying to the Lamb of God that taketh away 
the sins of the world. He has led the burdened soul to its Saviour. 
And in all he has seen that the Spirit of God accompanied and 
blessed his ministrations. 

Firmly as we hold the essential necessity of Apostolic author- 
ity to the existence of a valid ministry, who, of us all, will com- 
pare our labors, and God's blessing on them, as shown by their 
fruits, with those of many a man who has served God sincerely 
(and shall we dare to say not acceptably ?) in the ministry, which 
we hold to be without that authority ? Shall we not thank God 



28 Church and Sects. 

that such ministries are blessed to those they serve ; that albei, 
irregularly, and of merely earthly assumption though it be, God 
does bless, by His grace, the Word so preached to the salvation of 
men? 

Now we set aside all the common and apparent difficulties in 
the way of those who come to us from the ministries of the vari- 
ous sects — the severing of old ties of friendship and brotherhood, 
the odium of change, the humiliation of the confession that one has 
been wrong, and the pecuniary losses, which are the smallest. 
We set these aside altogether, and they are by no means obstacles 
to be despised or made light of. They are very serious difficulties, 
and are sufficient to hold many men, indeed all men but those of 
toughest fibre or most transparent conscientiousness, where they 
are even under distrust and doubt. 

This other matter is far beyond these, a difficulty that one won- 
ders is ever overcome. We demand that the man whose ministry 
(albeit unauthorized, as we claim,) has been thus blessed, thus 
certified to by the life-giving Spirit of God, shall come forward 
and confess before all men, and before God, that he has been a 
rash and sacrilegious profaner of the Divine treasures, of the Gos- 
pel and the Sacraments ! We insist that he shall confess that he 
has laid profane hands on sacred mysteries, that he ran before he 
was sent, that he has taken upon him holy functions which he, 
unauthorized, has performed ! And yet, all the time, he has the 
testimony that the Spirit of God accompanied and blessed his 
work! 

Is not the Church harder than her Master ? Is she not more 
righteous than the Lord ? Stricter than the Spirit of God ? 

But what shall she do ? Give up the claim to the necessity of 
a valid ministry ? Surrender her demand of Apostolicity, her 
witness for the One Church, and the One Order, and its historic 
continuity ? Admit these men to be regular ministers, or even 
valid members, though irregular? 

Clearly, nothing of the sort can be done. The Church can take 
no ground of this sort, nor can she bate one jot of her demands, 
one word of her testimony. 

But she can, as she does, pass light judgment on the matter, or 
refuse to pass any judgment at all. She can be as merciful as her 
God. She can smooth away all stumbling-blocks that are not ab- 
solutely necessary, that do not rest on the ground of doctrine. 



Church and Sects. 29 

What can she do ? 

She can change her Ordinal in a way which does not touch the 
validity of the Orders or the essence of that ceremonial, and can 
thus save the deep humiliation and pain which many an honest 
man must feel at the branding as a lie and an imposture all his 
past life, which, nevertheless, he honestly led in the service of 
God, and was entirely sincere and guiltless in, before God and 
men. She can thus smooth the way, for the return to the bosom 
of Christianity, of a large number of sincere and conscientious 
men. 

" Take thou authority to execute the office of a deacon in the 
Church of God now committed unto thee by the imposition of 
our hands." 

" Take thou authority to execute the office of a deacon in this 
Church, now committed," etc. 

Why not? Is there any less in the one case than in the other? 
As an alternative form, or a form which is to be used in the ad- 
mission of " ministers of other denominations," is it not as full 
in conferring the Order, as valid and perfect, as the other ? The 
words changed are no essential words in conferring Orders. 
" Take thou authority to execute the office of a deacon" are the 
only words essential. It may be in "this Church," or "the 
Church of God," or simply " in the Church," or there may be 
no mention of the Church, the thing being understood. 

It is in the hands of the Church, as a matter of discipline, to 
make such a slight alteration in the Ordinal as would in no de- 
gree compromise any doctrine or lower any testimony, and would 
yet greatly smooth the road into historic unity with the Catholic 
Church by saving us from making a man condemn what God has 
not condemned. 

We are fully aware that the idea may be a somewhat startling 
one. Nevertheless, it is no more startling than the proposition 
made some time ago, that our English or American Bishops join 
regularly hereafter in the consecration of each new Danish Super- 
intendent, so that, in a generation, with no word of debate about 
validity or invalidity, the Danish Church would secure the succes- 
sion — a proposition favored by Bishops and Clergy on both sides of 
the Atlantic. 

Neither is it as radical as the course pursued in giving the Episco- 
pate to Scotland, in Charles' time, when Presbyterian clergymen 



30 Chukch and Sects. 

were ordained Bishops at a jump, without any repudiation of their 
former Orders or any demand that all then recognized as clergy- 
men should be re-ordained. It was a healing measure, and was 
intended to work an imperceptible and natural change in the 
future. 

We believe that if the Protestant Episcopal Church in the 
United States is to rise to the measure of her duty as the Catholic 
Church of the country, she must be ready to listen to, and con- 
sider, a great many ideas which will seem startling at first. 

If she is to heal the sad divisions of this sect-torn land it must 
not be by sitting still, and saying : "Here I am, come to me, and 
be members of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and all will be 
well." It must be done by rising up and asking herself what she 
can do — how she can make the unification of Christianity about 
her in any degree easier to men. 



TEMPTATION : ITS MEANING. 

TEMPTATION is the normal condition of men. 
-*- One place may be more exposed than another, and the temp- 
tations of each place may differ from those of another, but there 
is no escape from temptation itself. 

The man who undertakes to live the Christian life, or indeed to 
conduct his life on any fixed principle whatever, must face the 
facts. He can surround himself with no walls high enough to 
wall out temptation. He can put no guards watchful enough to 
drive it away. 

And yet there has always been the wish to make the attempt. 
It was the motive that led men by thousands into the desert or the 
cell, only to find that in escaping the temptations of the world, 
they had rushed into the no less seductive temptations of solitude. 

It is better to know, to begin with, that there is no escape, that, 
in one form or another, temptation is, for all men, the condition 
of life. 

We naturally strive to hedge our children in from temptation. 
We do so by keeping them as long as possible from the knowledge 
of evil. Ignorance, we trust, will be the guard to protect them in 
their young days. How anxiously do we watch them ! How care- 
fully do we shield them ! And yet we know well that some time 
this must end. We would wish it to last a3 long as it may, but we 
know there is a limit. Some day we are startled at finding the 
child has already eaten of the fruit of the evil tree, which, since 
Adam, all have tasted sooner or later. The innocence of igno- 
rance is gone. On that ground it is no longer able to stand. 

We accept the discovery, if we be wise, in the spirit of wisdom. 
We know that the world and life are so arranged that innocence 
can only stand on ignorance in the earliest days. We consider, 
too, that such innocence has no moral value ; that it is really 
worth nothing, beautiful though it be, and fearless; that the only 
innocence which in this world will do, is the innocence which 

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32 Temptation : Its Meaning. 

knows guilt but can resist guilt, which discerns wrong and discerns 
it to hate and loathe, which stands on principle, and may be 
trusted in the face of trial. 

It is good that God's ordering takes the matter out of our weak 
hands, for certainly there is no father that would not keep his son, 
and especially his daughter, in the weak innocence of ignorance if 
he could. 

This fact of temptation, which meets all men that live, never- 
theless loses nothing of its strangeness by its commonness. Why 
does not God save us without it? Why are we exposed, by infi- 
nite wisdom, love and pity, to the chance of ruin every hour. Why 
do we hear the tempting voices luring us to destruction without us 
and within ? Since it is God's will that all men should be saved, 
why is it also God's will that all men should stand in hourly dan- 
ger of being lost? 

There are strange things, and things apparently contradictory, 
spoken of temptation in the Word ot God. Our Lord instructs us 
to pray, "Lead us not into temptation," and St. James bids us, 
" Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations." These ap- 
parent contradictions must be but two sides of the same truth. 
We must find place for the prayer, and place, too, for the joy. 
There must be that, in the nature and purpose of temptation, 
which makes both true. 

In speaking of the uses of pain, we have said that they grow 
out of the fact that this life is but a training for another. In that 
fact, too, we find the meaning of temptation. 

Men are in training for another life and another service. The 
world is worth just the training they get out of it — that, and no 
more. When a man comes to lie down at his work's end, it is 
not how much money he has made, nor how much fame he has 
acquired, nor what places he has filled, that is the question. The 
question is, "What has the man made of himself? — in heart, con- 
science, intellect, will; what does he come to?" When you an- 
swer that, you tell just the amount of use the man has got out of 
his life. All that he carries away with him. It is so much capital 
to enter on a new existence with. All else he leaves behind. It 
has no value where he is going. He takes his manhood with him, 
and nothing else. The clothing of his manhood, the masks and 
concealments of it, all drop off and leave him bare when he enters 
the land of realities. 



Temptation : Its Meaning. 33 

These are old truths, and they are preached in the streets of 
every city often enough by hearse and funeral train, one would 
think, to make them easily remembered. And yet they are the 
truths which are continually obscured and forgotten by those to 
whom they are of sole importance. 

We restate them here because they are in our line of thought, 
and essential to our argument. 

The purpose of the world is to make men. The process is a 
complicated one, and could have been arranged only by infinite 
wisdom. But being so arranged, all the details fit, and each thing 
is adequate to its end. 

There is no way to train human nature except by exercise. It 
must do something to grow. That is the case with it physically 
and intellectually, equally. Bodily muscles and mental muscles 
alike grow only under strain. It is so, too, with the spiritual 
powers, with conscience, and with will. Now all exercise argues 
resistance. It is force meeting force which makes exercise. Doing 
something always involves resistance against the doer. There is 
some dead weight to be raised, resisting blindly by its inertia, or 
some living and opposing force to be overcome, or there is noth- 
ing done. In the moral region this is equally the case. Moral 
growth comes by exercise, moral strength is acquired by doing, 
and the exercise and the doing involve the meeting of force with 
force, the overcoming of resistance. 

If this world be a place of training morally, and men a race of 
beings that require such training, it simply follows that doing right 
must not be easy. There must be difficulty about it, resistance, 
opposition. Without these there could be no exercise, and there- 
fore no growth. 

But while exercise is essential to growth, and resistance essential 
to exercise, neither must be too hard. The exercise which gives 
health and strength to the body, made more intense, or too pro- 
longed, may fatally injure the body. The resistance to overcome 
which is to make the muscles strong, if increased too far, strains 
and lames and destroys the muscles. The man yields — that is, 
instead of making the resistance yield — and is conquered instead 
of conqueror. 

So, too, with moral exercise. The resistance overcome, the force 
met and mastered, gives moral growth increased and increasing 
power. If the resistance be tco great, the labor too hard for the 
3 



34 Temptation : Its Meaning. 

strength, the exercise beyond the powers, the man falls and is 
morally overcome — "Lead us not into temptation" 

The resistance and difficulties in the way of moral action are 
called temptations. They are the things upon which the moral 
powers are exercised. Without them there could be for men, as 
we know them, no moral growth. There is care taken that they 
shall come, in due degree, to all men, that every man shall have 
the facilities for moral growth and strength which temptations 
furnish. Therefore, "count it all joy when ye fall into divers 
temptations." Consider them as what they are, means of spiritual 
exercise and helps to spiritual training. 

There is this to be said about them, too, that a man has no 
right to choose his own temptations. He has no right to throw 
himself voluntarily in the way of any temptation. While he 
stands where God has put him, in his own place and station, he 
finds the temptations which he can resist, and grow strong by re- 
sisting. No temptation takes him there " which is not common 
to man." To him there come the ordinary difficulties which the 
good God will have him exercise himself upon, difficulties which 
are apportioned to his strength and his necessities. In faith and 
with prayer he can resist effectively all that meet him there. He 
has then the promise of help, and he is there on his own ground, 
and can work like one who knows his ground and who fights for 
his own. 

But when one leaves that post and is self pleasing, chooses one 
for himself, he runs into strange temptations which were not in- 
tended for him. He does not understand them. They are not 
suited to his strength. He has volunteered for a warfare for 
which he was not chosen. He is off his own ground of vantage 
and stands in deadly danger. The slightest tampering will be his 
ruin. In the first case his wisdom is to stand and work the thing 
through with faith in his heart and prayer on his lips, for, at all 
hazards, he must hold the trust committed to him. In the other 
case, his business is to run away just as fast as he can, for he is 
out of his place, on ground of his own choosing, has lost the van- 
tage of position and let Satan choose the place of attack. He is 
at such a fearful disadvantage that he is almost sure to fall. 

And there is also another thing to be considered in the philoso- 
phy of temptation. 

Men f_.il and yield all about us. The temptation met and mas- 



Temptation : Its Meaning. 35 

tered this one or the other. We judge harshly and rashly often. 
We blame bitterly. We visit with fierce condemnation the man 
and the world, especially the woman who has fallen. 

Bat we are to remind ourselves that no two of us are tempted 
alike. The temptation which would be a small thing to one, is 
the ruin of another. By natural temperament, by education, by 
circumstances, one person may be utterly free from a whole class 
of temptations. He may be unable to understand how they are 
temptations at all. They are not so to him. He tramples right 
over them with scarcely a consciousness that the road is not per- 
fectly smooth, and when he sees some one fall under a temptation 
of this class he is naturally shocked and amazed. He cannot 
understand it. He condemns bitterly. It was so small a trial, a 
difficulty so insignificant from his point of view that he concludes 
the moral depravity must be horrible which would induce a sin 
on so small a ground. 

It would mitigate these harsh and often wicked judgments if 
we w r ere to remember that our temptations are our own ; that the 
thing which te3ts another may be no test for us, and that we may 
fail by what would seem no cause at all to him. 

Natural temper inclines one man to kindness and gentleness. 
There is no temptation to him at all to be harsh or cruel. H^ 
deserves no credit at all for benevolence or forgiveness. It is in 
his blood to give them. He is never harsh, this man, except 
when he sees a man fall through bitterness, hatred, malice, or re- 
venge. 

Another man finds no temptations at all connected with money, 
its loss or gain. He has been so made that it is utterly incom- 
prehensible to him how men should damn themselves for lucre. 
His temptations come not from that, nevertheless he has them, 
different in kind, but not in degree of intensity. 

Another man finds no temptation in pleasure or its enjoyment. 
A man of self-contained temper and high thought, dwelling in 
the regions of light and among the elder truths of existence, the 
mere pleasures and shows of the world pass him by as childish or 
unmanly. He wonders how such trifles can tempt any man. 
His temptations are stronger far, it may be, but they are as differ- 
ent from these as the North Pole from the South. 

Still another, sensitive in thought, clean and clear in fancy, 
with innate reverence for human nature in man or woman, and 



36 Temptation : Its Meaning. 

for his own body and soul, cannot understand the temptations 
which are against personal purity. That whole class, which is the 
ruin of thousands about him, contains no temptation to him. 
But he can take no credit to himself. There are those made and 
trained with such sensitive souls that an impurity, instead of 
being a temptation, is simply a horror and a loathing. These 
cannot understand why a man risks hell for the high satisfaction 
of first being a swine. 

It is this which makes our judgments so wretched and so un- 
just. It is this which condemns them. We do not know what 
we are talking about. God alone knows the man's frame, all his 
make-up, all his circumstances. God alone can judge him fairly 
when he falls. 

The sum is, that such temptations are necessary in such a 
world and to such a race. They have been transmuted by Di- 
vine love and wisdom into means of good. By them, as by 
stairs, hard and painful, rough and steep let them be, a man 
climbs, step by step, to the serene heights where they come not, 
because they are no longer needed. 

Men stumble and fall and go to ruin in the climbing. There is 
danger of this always in going up. But there is no other way to 
climb. 

And while a man stands on God's ground at his appointed 
work, the work laid on him by the order of life, he, leaning on 
God's hand, can "count it all joy" when his faith, his courage, 
his constancy, his truth, are tried. And, meanwhile, he prays, 
lest forsaking his post and recklessly giving up his vantage and 
choosing for himself by meeting what he is not called to meet — he 
prays, " Lead us not into temptation." 



A BIT OF THOUGHT. 

THERE is no man so important as he seems. It is wonderful 
■*■ how weli the world gets on without any of us. 

Somebody, on whose shoulders seems to rest the weight of a 
State, dies, and we all cry out: " How shall we do, now he is gone? 
Who can take his place and bear his burdens ? Alas ! the fixed 
stars are all dying out in our sky. We have only farthing candles 
left to light the darkness of the world." 

We bury him, and say our say over him, and in a few months 
we have ceased to miss him. The world goes on just as usual. 

Somebody dies in the Church. He has been a leader for long. 
We have all looked upon him as a fixture. His place and work 
have been a part of our lives for years. We feel a blank sense of 
loss, which nothing can fill. We look about and decide that no 
one can do what he has done. 

He is buried, amid our lamentations, and the Church goes on 
just the same. In a few weeks' or months' time we scarcely miss 
the man we mourned. Somehow his place is filled, and things go 
on just as they always have. 

The generations are long. The single life is short. The ages 
have their long story to tell. The largest life is but an episode. 

There is a lesson of humility here and a lesson of wisdom. The 
best of us will not be much missed. The work is of more conse- 
quence than the worker. We do our small share better or worse, 
but the world, and the ages, and the great God, can get on satis- 
factorily without us. After all, we are personally more interested 
than they in seeing that we do our day's work well. 

There is a lesson also of»hope. The work will be done by some- 
body. We need never fear of that. Our lives may seem failures, 
our feeble efforts of little worth. Let us not fret. It is ours to do 
what we can. The great business will prosper, no matter what 
becomes of the single doer. 

Meanwhile, if a man wants the conceit taken out of him, let 

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38 A Bit of Thought. 

him, no matter how large a space he fills, withdraw from the work 
and get into some corner, under the delusion that everything will 
come to a dead-lock without him. 

It will not be long before he finds how small a cipher he is in 
the great result, which is summed up just as well without him as 
with him. 

The truth is, there was never the man yet that the world could 
not do without. There was never the man yet that the Church, if 
necessary, could not spare. 



THE ENGINEER. 

Tj^EW of the many thousands who travel on our numerous rail- 
^ roads know, or give a thought to, the men to whose care and 
skill they are mainly indebted for safety in their journey. 

It is not to the " gentlemanly " conductor, neatly dressed, smiling 
and polite, that you, madam, or you, sir, owe the care of life or 
limb. 

The conductor is very useful in his place, and a great deal de- 
pends upon him to make your journey pleasant. On our Western 
and Southern roads he usually spares no pains in that respect, 
and looks after the welfare of ladies and children travelling alone 
. — with as much solicitude as if they were of his own family. In- 
deed, we know no nobler and more kindly men than a dozen of 
the conductors on the roads on which we travel. We never pass 
over the roads that we do not see some instance of real kindliness 
and consideration on the part of one or more of these friends 
— for some of them are long time and valued friends, indeed. 

But, as we say, your life and limbs, madam, are not entrusted 
to the conductor. Look up the platform before you start, and 
you will possibly see, standing by the engine, an ordinary looking 
working man, his hands blackened, and perhaps his face; his 
clothes stained with oil, his greasy cap drawn over his eyes. That 
is the engineer — the man into whose hands you and five hundred 
other people, as far as men can, are going absolutely to commit 
your lives. He steps upon the "foot-board," and you draw in 
your head and quietly settle on your cushioned seat, and for two 
hundred miles you depend on the nerve, the skill, the soberness, 
of that slovenly looking man, whom you never saw before, and 
to whom, out there in the forefront, you never give a thought. 

It has been our lot, in missionary service, or otherwise, to travel 
many thousands of miles. We have come to know the railroad 
people, from the superintendent, whose autograph has been so 
often welcome to us, to John, the brakesman, who greets us with 

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40 The Engineer. 

a " Good day, sir." And our verdict is, that the men who build 
and run our railroads are about as large-hearted, kindly, and 
noble a set of gentlemen (we include John especially in the word 
gentlemen) as can be found in the world. 

And yet we did not know, almost alone of all the men that 
man our usual trains, one to whom we, and the thousands who 
pass over the miles of iron, owe so much of the sense of security 
which we enjoy on a well-ordered road — we did not know the 
engineer. 

The other day our friend, the conductor, led us up to a stalwart, 
frank-looking, rather greasy personage standing by the engine 
and introduced us to the engineer. The engineer greeted us cor- 
dially and invited us to try a ride on his "conveyance." We 
accepted the invitation with pleasure, remarking: "You have a 
fine engine here." " Well," was the reply, " she's not a showy 
engine — I've seen handsomer — but she's steady and does her work 
well." Exactly, sir, as you might speak of a horse! 

We stepped on the foot-board, and our friend stowed us away 
conveniently, giving a warning about oil. The signal was given, 
and we started. We could not but note the engineer's bearing, as 
he mounted his steed. He grasped the shining lever as one might 
seize the reins of a fiery team. He patted the glittering brazen 
knobs, here and there, as a man might a favorite animal. His 
figure rose erect; the lips compressed themselves ; the eye light- 
ened. He evidently felt the enormous trust reposed in him — to 
guide that tremendous mass of power safely across from lake to 
river, with five hundred precious lives behind him. It was the 
captain on the quarter-deck ; the same fixed lookout ahead, the 
same firm pose of command. 

We threaded our way slowly among the maze of switches out of 
the depot grounds. Beyond, the engine warmed to her work. 
Farther back came the lever, and we were soon thundering along 
the iron parallels which looked ahead like an enormous V, whose 
apex was forever running into distance. 

It was glorious. The fresh air, the swift fields scudding by, the 
whole broad outlook over lake and forest ; and the panting engine 
throbbing as if it were living, as it dashed onward and seemed to 
suck the distance in ! We could understand the excitement which 
keeps men driving these enormous horses of fire through night 
and darkness, through sleet and storm and hail, and makes them 
love their most laborious life. 



The Engineer. 41 

We do not know what the English " engine-driver" is ; but 
judging from Dickens's stories he is no such man as the American 
engineer. 

There was small chance for speech, of course, except when the 
train stopped a moment. But we found our new friend a man 
who thoroughly understood the enormous power he controlled. 
The whole theory and practice of the steam engine was at his fin- 
gers' ends. 

The truth is, some of the very noblest qualities of manhood are 
called into daily exercise by the occupation of the railroad engi- 
neer. There must be faithfulness, calmness, set purpose, firm 
nerve, clear eye, ready hand and assured courage. A moment's 
tremor, a false movement, a single lack of confidence in himself 
and the engineer and half a thousand men, women and children 
are hurled to destruction. 

It is impossible that a man can carry this vast sense of respon- 
sibility, and feel this vast trust, without developing, under his bur- 
den, many things that do human nature honor. 

We never enjoyed such a ride before ; we never made a chance 
acquaintance from which we derived more pleasure. We stepped 
off at our own station, and thanked the engineer heartily for the 
pleasure he had given us, making up our mind, at the same time, 
to tell you, sir, and you, madam, that when it comes in your way 
you cannot do better than to show some consideration for " the 
engineer;" and that when you see an " accident," and " nobody 
killed but the engineer," you, at least, may know that the chances 
are ten to one that no braver and nobler heart than " the engi- 
neer's" is left beating still. 



SLAVERY OF SIN. 

SPHERE is nothing more wonderful in the experience of human 
-*- nature than the power which a sin committed has over its 
doer. 

The sinner creates a monster in his sin. He might have re- 
fused had he chosen, but he did not choose. He exercised this 
terrible prerogative of human nature, the power of creating a 
wrong — a thing the Great God Himself cannot do — and behold, 
the work of his own hands makes him henceforth its Slave. 

The fearful fascination which a crime exercises over its doer is 
well known to those who have to deal with criminals. The mur- 
derer feels an overpowering desire to talk about the murder. He 
is drawn to listen wherever men speak of it. His memory and 
imagination are always going back to it, reproducing the circum- 
stances, recounting all the details. He sees the spot, the victim, 
the instrument of death, the scuffle, the blow, the fall, the dead 
face, the hasty bloody grave. He sees all and hears all. He goes 
back in fancy to that grave which conceals his crime. It lies in 
his mind as the centre point of the universe. He wants to inquire 
about it, to watch it, to ask everybody if anything is known about 
it, if anybody suspects him. It is with the greatest difficulty he 
can hold back from bursting in and crying out that he can ex- 
plain it all. 

It is because of this fascination the crime once done, exercises 
over the criminal, that the old proverb, " Murder will out " — is so 
frequently proved true. It is because human nature is made as it 
is that the words of wisdom are the words of experience, " Be sure 
your sin will find you out." 

A man may forget, or at least think he forgets. He may try 
new scenes, new friends, new occupations, but there is no escape. 
Back in the past lies that creation of his, the child of his own 
soul. He cannot disown it. It looms darkly through the haze at 
times, and at times is lighted with the lurid light of hell, but there 

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Slavery of Sin. 43 

it is, named with his name, bearing his sign manual, a thing of 
his doing, there it is with all its belongings of time and place, of 
words and looks, of thoughts and passions, and it insists on recog- 
nition. He shall not disown it. The hideous thing demands that 
its creator shall face it and confess, " this thing is mine." 

This power of doing, of creating and making, is the most awful 
prerogative possessed by man. The thing done has an existence 
of its own from the time it is done. It cannot be annihilated. It 
cannot be blotted out. It may be repented of, it may be mourned 
over, but there it is. Tears may fall like rain upon it, but they 
cannot wash it out. It is done. Time and the world, and all they 
hold, must take it as it stands, and the doer must be content to 
see his deed pass utterly beyond his power, and be just as eternal 
as himself. 

When the bad thing is created, when the sin, the crime, the 
evil deed is done, it has passed utterly beyond the control of its 
doer. He cannot recall it. Sometimes he can do something to 
prevent its evil. Just as often he can do really nothing. Bat 
that is not all. Not only has he ceased to have any control over 
it, having once created it, it now begins to control him. It re- 
mains in memory and dominates memory. He is brought back 
to it from any distance of time, compelled to look at it and ac- 
knowledge it. The mean bad thing, done years ago in boyhood 
perhaps, or in early manhood, sorrowed over, prayed over it may 
be, will call back the gray-headed man to look upon and con- 
fess it, and shudder over a hideous thing he had dreamed had 
been sleeping quietly under the clover, forgotten of all men for 
years. It dominates imagination as well as memory. It will re- 
peat itself over and over again, and call back the thought to con- 
sider, " What if I had done differently, what if I had said this 
instead of that, if I had done this and not the other, if such and 
such a thing had only happened instead of the reverse." It is a 
perpetual problem — an unsolved problem. The fancy goes all 
over it, looks upon it from all sides, wonders "how could I have 
done it?" — and finds no answer satisfactory, though it tries hun- 
dreds. There is that hideous guest standing in the centre of the 
consciousness. He insists on due attention. He speaks, and he 
must be heard. "He is here, and how came he here?" — is the 
question he forever asks, and the question that forever leaves the 
unhappy soul bewildered. It rules by fear, too. There is the never 



44 Slavery of Sin. 

ceasing dread that it may be discovered. That it will sometime 
be discovered, is a possibility that is always present. The hideous 
guest not only asks, "How came I here? why did you bring me?" 
He also asks, " How are you to hide me now I am here ?" He 
cannot be shown to others. He must somehow be concealed, 
and under this necessity of concealment also the sinner becomes 
his slave by another chain. 

The need of hiding the thing not only usurps the conduct of 
life, it keeps up perpetually the sense of its presence and reality. 
To keep others unconscious the sinner must himself be conscious. 
lie must make up to his guest for the lack of all other acquaint- 
ances. He must listen to him, study him, serve him, wait upon 
him, alter his whole life and bearing, and change the color of the 
world at his bidding, and never forget. 

The Apostle wrote, " Whosoever committeth sin is the slave (so 
in the Greek) of sin." He wrote not only revelation but ordinary 
human experience. There are such sins as will claim a man 
to their service head and foot. Single sins will do it in many a 
life. They will stand, year in and out, as the masters of that life, 
coloring it, controlling it, guiding it, while they ruin it. 

But no sins are single. They propagate in any life very rap- 
idly, and almost any breach of one commandment is virtually a 
breach of the whole. The necessity of concealment at once makes 
the sinner at least a liar, and usually an habitual liar. He has to 
lie in w T ord, and lie in act, and lie in look, to make himself a liv- 
ing lie, perhaps to those nearest him and who love him most, that 
he may conceal the vile thing that is his master. Lying of the 
meanest, deceit to the dearest, cheating and trickery at the very 
fireside, at lying down and rising up, hypocrisy before all he loves 
and reverences, are at once the result of any sin which must be 
concealed. The road to hell is travelled very fast, and it often 
happens that one single sin may so rot out the heart Of the sinner 
by the other sins that it brings as its necessary companions, that a 
fair and honorable life is at one step made foul with all the foul- 
ness of hell, and false as the father of lies. We are often startled 
at the strange sight of a life, in all respects upright, pure and hon- 
orable, becoming at one stride, as it were, shameless, dishonorable 
and vile. 

It seems impossible to understand how such a stride could have 
been taken, how such a horrible change could have been made so 



Slavery of Sin. 45 

suddenly. And it is strange if we do not understand this terrible 
power of sin to enslave, and to load the slave down at once with 
an hundred other sins as soon as he has sold himself to one. 

Nobody expects to go to ruin at one step. No man ever thought 
to walk so fast that he could not turn. He would go a few paces 
down the road to ruin just to see what the road is like, but would 
come back at once, and no harm would be done to anybody. 

Bat another curious thing about sin and its slaves is that it does 
not take big sins to kidnap the slaves. As a matter of fact, the 
big sins would be usually the least lucky. They are ugly, trucu- 
lent, coarse, and they frighten the victims. Few men could be 
found to travel down the road any distance in company with one 
of these. There are little, smiling, innocent, harmless looking sins 
in hundreds. It is with one of these the journey is always begun. 
" They are so weak looking, of no importance anyway, one can 
just turn his back upon them and walk away, it is not worth while 
being alarmed." 

It is just these harmless little sins that do all the capturing. 

Their slaves are writhing in the lowest depths in thousands. 
They get hold of the soul gently. They do not frighten it. Step 
by step they lead it by the hand, till all at once there starts up on 
the road beside it or before it the strong, coarse, hideous out- 
spoken sin that has been waiting for its coming and demands it for 
its own. 

The soul starts back in horror, often to retreat, and discovers 
the other horror that it cannot retreat, that it has lost the way, that 
there is, as it thinks at least, no return, and beaten down and de- 
spairing it yields. 

A man is led by promising ventures which j ust tremble on the 
edge of strict integrity, by little transactions which, if not exactly 
according to rule, are, at least, not in intention dishonest, by small 
stretches of permitted management he is led to take at last the 
step which makes him a forger or a thief. 

A woman is led by vanity, by love of admiration, by things 
small and harmless in themselves, concealed where, however, 
they should be known, by things apparently trifling and not worth 
mentioning or considering, till one day she finds the meshes tan- 
gled about her and she is helpless and lost. Shuddering at the 
hideous thing whose slave she henceforth is, and vowing she never 
dreamed of expecting it. 



46 Slavery of Sin. 

In either case there was no intention, and no belief that there 
was the slightest danger of an ending which was so shocking that 
it was supposed impossible, that if ever looked for was on the in- 
stant scouted as a thing preposterous. And yet in each case the 
end is reached by a logic as strong as an iron chain. There was 
no point in the progress where return was easier than at another, 
and if we follow up the links we find that the first link determines 
the whole. From the first small, trifling aberration to this end, 
wretched and vile as it may be, there was one straight unswerv- 
ing path. 

We have nothing to say here about habit, and the slavery it 
puts on those who have submitted. There are cases all about us 
where men are taken from our sides bound hand and foot in the 
links of vile habit, are carried away shrieking out prayers for de- 
liverance, carried away and down to a ruin clearly seen from the 
first. But these cases do not startle us, after all. We saw the 
steps by which the habit was formed. We knew it was daily 
growing stronger. We well knew what the end would be. Per- 
haps we warned the unhappy soul of the result. Now that it has 
come, terrible as it is, it is something we fairly expected. We can 
understand easily enough in these cases how a man is the slave of 
sin. 

But it is the other class that shock us and bewilder us, the cases 
where a fair life suddenly turns foul in a night, where an honor- 
able name in a day becomes a shame, where a goodly structure 
of character, erected by years of care and patience, goes to ruin 
in a moment. 

These cases are all explainable on the knowledge of the pe- 
culiar power of wrong over its doer. The ruin was carefully pre- 
pared for after all. The building was patiently undermined. 
The unhappy slave, who never dreamed he was a slave, from the 
first has been quietly working on under his unyielding master, 
and here, to-day, is the end. There is adequate cause for it if we 
could but see. No man ever jumped into hell at one bound. 
The merciful Lord has so arranged our mortal life that there is a 
long, slow road to be travelled first, with warnings at the entrance 
and warnings at every turn. The thing is sudden, only because 
we have not seen all the steps. 

We have spoken of repentance in connection with sin. It can- 
not remove it. It cannot make it as if it had not been. Oceans 



Slavery of Sin. 47 

of tears from the murderer will not restore the life that is taken. 
No repentance can check the overflowing tide of evil from an evil 
deed, much less destroy out of existence the evil deed itself. 

By repentance, by faith, by prayer, by confession and amend- 
ment of life, a man may be delivered from the slavery of his sin, but 
never, in this world at least, can he annihilate the sin or destroy 
the scars of his slavery. He is marked with the stripes of a slave 
for life. The stripes may heal. Christ, the great Physician, will 
heal them with the balms of heaven, but the scars remain. The 
converted and restored sinner is not as the man who never sinned. 
He may be a more wonderful instance of God's love and grace 
which reach all depths to deliver, but he is a different work. This 
much, even as Christ's freeman shall remain to him as a memo- 
rial of the pit out of which he was digged, that he shall bear till 
he dies the scars of the chains. 



THE USE OF RITUALISM. 

A FACETIOUS correspondent at last tells us what is the use of 
-£*- " Kitualism." He has discovered that it is just the thing for 
the Negroes I 

He says: "Their imagination (the Negroes') must be touched, 
their xsthetie tastes gratified, by splendid vestments, gorgeous cere- 
monies, thrilling music, working upon them in the dim religious 
light from colored, pane, and burning candle, struggling through 
rising clouds of incense." 

It has been a question with many just what sort of tastes it was 
sought to gratify by the barbaric glitter of crimson, green and gold 
embroidered copes, and the cheap gilding of tinselled altars. The 
answer of our correspondent is, " The Eesthetic tastes" of the South- 
ern Negro ! 

Also it has been a question, how far we are to go in " Kitualism." 
That is, the Rev.Copely Monotone begins to introduce green copes, 
yellow tippets, blue slippers and gilt candlesticks ; and to convert 
the decent and solemn altar of the Church into a show stand of 
lacquer ware, on the ground that there is " no law" to prevent 
him. 

Now, perhaps, we have no objection, so far. But where is it to 
end ? Since the Rev. Copely has taken that track, and there is 
" no law" to stop him, where will he bring up ? What guide has 
he? 

This very important question our correspondent also answers- 
He is to go where the " aesthetic tastes" of the Negro lead him. 
According to those " tastes" he is to conduct his ritual ! 

The correspondent has stated in seriousness, however, a philo- 
sophic principle. As a fact, the people who were first furnished 
with the " dresses" and " ceremonies" which " the Ritualists" call 
" Catholic," were just about in the condition of the Southern Ne- 
gro at present. A ceremonial which grew up among the serfdom 
of the Middle Ages, may possibly please even the more civilized 
Negro of Georgia for a while. 

(48) 



The Use of Ritualism. 49 

The correspondent goes on: " Many of them (the Negroes) who 
have been baptized, and brought up within the Fold, are swallowed 
up by Romish propagandists and strolling Methodist or Baptist 
preachers. And why ? Simply because the Church does not give 
them what the Negro nature craves, and will have — animal ex- 
citement, or richness and grandeur in forms of worship. These 
are offered elsewhere — excitement in the howlings and revivals of 
Methodists and Baptists; and pomp and splendor in the worship 
of the Church of Rome." 

The Negro is, unfortunately, not the only person who insists on 
being saved in his own way, who will have certain fancies of his 
own at all costs. Whether the Gospel is to accommodate itself to 
the Negro's self-will, more than to other people's, is the question. 

But, granting his " aesthetic taste" is to be the measure of fit- 
ness, reverence and dignity in public worship — granting we are to 
accommodate ourselves to his wants and instincts — it seems there 
are two plans to choose — either " the howlings" and " the revivals," 
or Romish " pomp" and splendor. 

Now, so far, the " howlings" have had rather the best of it. There 
are vast masses of Methodist and Baptist Negroes, and not many 
Romish. Evidently, on this argument, it will be best for us to go 
to " howling" at once. The Negro's " aesthetic taste" is thus best 
suited. And as that is the standard of ritualistic fitness, the Rev. 
Copely should begin at once to practice. And, by the way, that 
may be what he is about, in certain intoning which we have heard 
sometimes, from gentlemen with very little music, in their voices, at 
least. 

We commend the matter to the Commission. The choice lies 
between "howlings" and red copes. For the obstinate Negro will 
have one or the other. " Howlings" or " rising clouds of incense;" 
the autocratic Freedman insists that we adopt the one or the 
other. 



RESTITUTION. 

T\) true repentance, forgiveness is at once granted — full and free 
■*■ forgiveness. 

There can be no doubt of God's action. The only doubt is 
about the human action. Is the repentance true? 

Manifestly every repentance is not true. Few people are so far 
gone in sin that they do not at times feel sorrow for their sin, and 
make strong resolutions to sin no more. People do this while 
they still go on sinning. They are sorry for each sinful act after it 
is done, determine to repeat it no more, and then go straight on 
and repeat it at the next temptation. 

Every sorrow for sin then, every sorrow soon accompanied with 
strong resolutions to sin no more, is not true repentance. Repent- 
ance, to be of any value, must work a total reformation, an entire 
change from sin to holiness, and neither the sinner himself, nor 
anybody else can be certain that his repentance is true, until it 
has been crystallized into holy living. Emotions, aspiration s 
mental exercises, are of value, solely as they change the life. We 
know nothing of their quality until they are put into practice. 
Often they pass away and come to nothing. Often men go on 
sinning and repenting to their utter ruin, paving their road to hell 
with the very best resolutions. We never know of any repent- 
ance, of any good resolution, whether it is not an addition to this 
pavement until it has taken shape in life. 

And here is the reason of the fearful uncertainty that, in this 
world, hangs over death-bed repentances. It can never be known 
whether they are true or sham repentances. The opportunity of 
testing them was not given. 

While, therefore, the sinner should never doubt that to true re- 
pentance pardon will be given, he should take care to be certain 
that his repentance is true. Death and life to him hang on that 
issue. The divine part in the transaction is certain. The human 

(50) 



Restitution. 51 

part is that in which uncertainty comes in, that which should 
cause all the anxiety. 

Now there is nothing about which men are more apt to delude 
themselves, than about the sincerity of their repentance. They 
are very apt to put up with a delusive and cheating and half-way 
repentance. They do not test it, perhaps they dare not. They 
content themselves with assurances of God's mercy, as though that 
were the point in doubt, and leave untested the only thing about 
which there is doubt, their own sincerity. There is one thing by 
which the truth of repentance can be tested better and more uni- 
versally perhaps, than by anything else, and that is by the making 
of restitution. 

It requires but a moment's thought to see that restitution is an 
essential pait of repentance, and the Church so puts it in her 
warning before the Holy Communion. 

We should have but little faith in the repentance of the thief 
who refused to return what he had stolen, in the repentance of 
the dishonest man who still retained his ill-gotten gains, in tha,t of 
the slanderer who refused to undo the ill-effects of his slander. 
It is not enough that the thief cease to steal for the future. He 
must restore what he has stolen in the past. It is not enough 
that the dishonest man cease his dishonest tricks for the future, he 
must disgorge his already acquired plunder. He must, if neces- 
sary, work hard, live hard, and suffer if need be, to do it. It is 
not enough that the slanderer cease his slandering hereafter. He 
must set himself patiently to work to undo the effect of his 
slander, and remedy, as far as he can, his grievous wrong. 

Common-sense recognizes the principle as soon as it is stated, 
that the sincerity of repentance is measured by the earnestness 
and completeness of the effort to make restitution. 

Our sins wrong others. These others suffer. They suffer unde- 
servedly and guiltlessly. Our repentance is a delusion of the 
devil if it do not lead us to make it the first purpose of our lives 
to right our wrongs. 

And yet into a great deal that goes under the name of repent- 
ance, repentance on which men stake their salvation before God, 
this never comes. The man who thinks himself repentant, and 
who cheats himself with the devil's lie that he is forgiven, consid- 
ers that he is doing very well to cease from sinning, though the 
wrongs of ail his past life lie behind him. There is nothing to 



52 Restitution. 

which the devil is readier to help men, than to a half-way repent- 
ance of this sort. He will help them to bury the past, and cheat 
them with the hope that that blackened and accursed past will 
never rise again to condemn them. 

We emphasize the fact that the past at least is sure. A man 
cannot rid himself of that. It is his whatever be the future. He 
must do something with it. If it be an accursed, blackened and 
vile past, he cannot annihilate it by forgetting it, ignoring it, or 
burying it out of his sight. It will not be forgotten, will not be 
buried. It will rise to blast and wither him at the last. 

He must mend it, he must even destroy it, if it may be, in the 
future. The meaning of true repentance is that it sets him to do- 
ing this. He turns to make restitution to God and man, to right 
the wrongs he has done, to turn aside the curses he has brought 
down, to think, and plan and toil for the sweeping away of the 
evils he has caused. Merely to do nothing of the sort hereafter, if 
that were possible, is neither to repent nor to reform. His life 
deals with the past as it deals with the future, and his future is 
given him to redeem his past. 

The devil's lies are blinding men in thousands even in the 
Church and at the altar, and are sending them, so blinded, on the 
primrose path to everlasting fire. A man will cheat and overreach 
and make his fortune so, and will consider it, and be allowed to 
consider it, a satisfactory repentance if some day he stops cheat- 
ing, and hereafter lives " honestly" on the gains of his cheating! 

The best pew in the Church, and the highest consideration in a 
Christian community will be his ! 

A man will conduct a disreputable, knavish business, or will 
conduct an honest calling in a disreputable and knavish way, till 
he has amassed a competence, and will then " repent" and retire 
from the business, be baptized or confirmed, and count himself a 
very good Christian thereafter, with his whole past life lying un- 
mended behind him, ready to rise up and claim him at the last. 

A man will lead a libertine life, and kill souls as well as ruin 
earthly lives, and some day when he is tired of this will " repent," 
will marry, "settle down" and become the father of a family, and 
enjoy the sweet satisfaction of believing himself a changed man, 
while his whole accursed past with all its victims lives to claim 
him for its own, to blast and wither him in some dark day 
of God. 



Restitution. 53 

Men all about us are making repentances of this sort, and pain- 
fully cheating themselves with the delusion that they are repent- 
ances which secure forgiveness. Sometimes, in this world, the 
delusion is exploded in terror and shame. Oftener they go on 
cheating to the end, vaguely hoping that God will work a miracle 
in their case and save them in spite of themselves. 

A man's business in this world is to do no wrong. If he has 
been tempted to do wrong, his business is to repent of the wrong 
and to devote himself to the undoing of it. The wrong ought not 
to last at all. It is a thing that never ought to have been. But 
owing to his sin it is now, and he must devote himself to making 
it cease to be. 

Wrongs done to God He can forgive. Wrongs done to man, 
God and man both must forgive. While a single unrighted wrong, 
done to any human being, lies on a man's conscience, he is cheat- 
ing himself if he dares to dream that God forgives him. We say 
it with reverence, but with full knowledge of what we are saying, 
that God cannot forgive the man who allows wrong which he has 
done his neighbor to remain unrighted. It is a blasphemous 
mockery to ask Him. With the curses of those he has wronged 
weighing his soul to the Pit, a man makes a strange appearance at 
the mercy-seat of God. 

But it may be said there are wrongs which a man cannot right. 
He has done them, and those who have suffered them have passed 
out of his knowledge, or beyond his reach, or they are dead. Or 
the wrongs are such that they cannot be atoned for ; so bitter, so 
deep, so demonlike, that a dozen lives, if the doer had them, 
would not atone for the ruin he has wrought. 

What is to be done then ? 

We answer it is one of the burdens laid on the sinner often, a 
burden he must bear till he dies, a deserved burden, this, that the 
conviction comes to him some day when his conscience is truly 
wakened, that he can only undo a part of his ill-doing, that his 
sins are too many for him, that they have overwhelmed him, and 
that he must stagger on with prayers and cries, and drink the 
wormwood and the gall all the days of his life, if so be, the Al- 
mighty One will help him to his deliverance. 

It is the fact that many and many a man cannot right the 
wrongs he has done, or eradicate a tithe of the evil he has caused, 
toil as he may. But none the less is he to be faithful in mending 



54 Eestitution. 

his own past as far as it may be mended. That he cannot do all 
is no reason why he shall not do what he may. 

In the old days, men burdened with the sense of the evil and 
the ruin their sins had caused, devoted themselves for life to works 
of charity, put themselves in the forlorn hope in the ranks of 
mercy, nursed the fever stricken or the plague struck, or buried 
the dead in the pestilence, or sold all they had and fled to the cell 
or the hermitage to spend a life in prayer, or went on pilgrimages 
to far lands to lay their heavy burden down. 

In our selfish comfort-seeking age it is the fashion to sneer at 
all this. We take our repentance easier now. Oar evil livers are 
troubled by no pangs of conscience. They " repent" as they call 
it, and live as luxuriously, eat, sleep, drink and dress as well as if 
they had never helped to curse God's world and people hell. 

We are not going to advocate the old way of putting repent- 
ance into life, though there might be worse ways than that. The 
manner of it is perhaps of no consequence. But one thing we 
say, and it cannot be impressed too strongly on the shallow 
thought of the time, shallow in the Church as in the world, that 
the value of repentance depends upon the degree in which it 
seeks to mend in the future the wrongs of the past, in which it 
strives to make restitution for all injuries, amendment for all evils, 
in which it works and toils to obtain man's forgiveness as well as 
God's. 

And if in the earnest and true striving to mend the evils of an 
evil life, a man finds there are evils he cannot right, wrongs that 
his victims have carried into eternity and beyond his power, let 
him devote himself then to the restitution of others not yet lost 
but in danger from like temptation, let him in short work, give, 
pray, do anything save settle down into a respectable self-indul- 
gent life after a course of evil living, and allow the devil to cheat 
him with the notion that his repentance is anything but an insult 
to man, and a blasphemous pretence before God, or his course 
anything but a course that leads to ruin everlasting. And none 
the less a course that leads there, though it go by the way of the 
font and the altar. 



A HOUSE DIVIDED. 

T ONG ago the Lord of all Light and Truth, declared that " a 
•^ house divided against itself cannot stand." He was speaking 
for all time, and His words are the announcement of a fact as 
plain now as it was then. 

We all bewail the feebleness that results from Christendom's 
divisions. We have practical demonstrations of them every day 
we live. The world remains the devil's to this day because 
Christianity is a house divided against itself. To this day we pray 
with no answer, because we make the answer impossible, the old 
prayer Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in 
Heaven. The law of that Kingdom, and the clearest utterance of 
that will, "That they may be one" — we resist, while we make a 
faithless repetition with the lips. 

It has seemed to many of us that a main duty of the Church in 
this land was to testify to the old truth of unity, that her mission 
is, especially now and here, to bear witness against the folly and 
wickedness of dividing the house which the Lord builded. By 
her presentation of the old Order as well as the old Faith, by her 
principle, on which she never falters, that the Church is of divine 
and not human making, that there can be no tampering with the 
Lord's building by human fancy or self-pleasing, we have seen 
that she is the appointed witness, as for all truth, so here and now 
especially, for those truths, forgotten or denied, which are essential 
to Christian unity. 

But the value of her testimony is lessened by her own defi- 
ciencies. As Christianity fails to advance because it is so greatly 
" a house divided against itself," so the Church, which is especially 
appointed in the over-ruling providence of God to bear witness 
against that division, fails in her work because she also is "'a house 
divided against itself." 

She is inconsistent with herself and all about her see the incon- 
sistency. She preaches unity to others, and is herself, they think, 
an example of division. They exaggerate, it is true. They mis- 

(55) 



56 A House Divided. 

apprehend things which, to us, are plain. Nevertheless their 
opinion is natural and has, we must sadly confess, good grounds 
for its existence. 

The Church which is organically one, which preserves its out- 
ward order unbroken, is not that loving family which that organi- 
zation and order was intended to create and conserve. Having 
the outward unity unbroken, we appear to be content with that, 
and patiently to endure any amount of isolation, and unbrotherli- 
ness inside. 

The evils which our lack of unity produces are incapable of ex- 
aggeration. They stare us in the face at every turn. They are a 
shame and disgrace to us before all men, and a double shame and 
disgrace in the face of our high professions of the value and 
necessity of unity. 

We confess they make us sick. When men will do more for 
party than for the Church of God, when they will be at pains to 
sow distrust, to vilify brethren, to misinterpret motives, when they 
will support presses and societies for the purpose of creating sus- 
picion- of brethren, when by tongue and pen, openly and secretly, 
they will labor to embarrass and confuse brethren engaged in 
their divinely appointed duties, when Christian men in the same 
communion are divided into small parties and smaller cliques, 
each jealous and suspicious of the other, it is a sight to make any 
honest man sick at the heart. 

The work before us is plain. Thousands of us see it. It lies 
as a burden upon conscience. It is ours and we cannot shirk it 
or deny it. It lies undone, and will lie undone, until we learn 
that houses divided against themselves cannot stand. Till the 
man who sows distrust in a parish is looked [upon as the enemy 
of Christ and His Church, till the man who confuses and distracts 
the Church is taken by all honest men for the worst sort of an 
apostate, till then there will be, for us, no peace and no progress 
such as the world has the right to expect at our hands. 

First of all, we must learn to call things by their right names. 
There are things for which abhorrence and detestation are the 
only healthy emotions. And in a Church like our own, with, such 
a work before her, hinderers within are the worst of foes. To 
call out a healthy Church sentiment on this subject, a senti- 
ment which will keep no measures with such crying evils, a senti- 
ment which will not hesitate to speak out its honest convictions 



A House Divided. 57 

and denounce what cries to heaven for denunciation is one of the 
first bits of work before us. 

We must learn to endure no selfish isolation in any parish or 
any clergyman, in the large family of the diocese, and no such 
isolation in the larger family of the Church. 

The men or the organization that stands alone, that refuses help 
and cooperation, must be allowed to gratify that idiosyncrasy 
somewhere else than in a body of which the charter is "all ye 
are brethren," and where the command is " bear ye one another's 
burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ." The spirit which guides 
to such isolation and individual self pleasing, call itself what it 
may and pretend what motive it may, is a spirit that does not 
come from the direction of heaven. 

The spirit of the Church is the spirit of brotherliness and mu- 
tual help. It is open, manly, and above board in all its works 
and plans. Whatever goes against it, come whence it will, and 
from whom it will, it is our bounden duty to denounce and de- 
stroy. The unhappy men who are led by an opposite spirit we 
may pity, and should try to bring to repentance, but there should 
be no mistake in giving them to understand that in all honest 
men's opinion they are the foes of Christ and His Church. 

To gather up the ravelled threads of unity, to bring all the 
members of the Church to stand together as one household, to 
allow men honestly to hold, and openly to express their opinions 
on matters which the one Faith leaves indifferent, to insist on 
openness and honest dealing as the method of intercourse be- 
tween all members of the Body, and as the method on which all 
its business must be conducted, to demand the abolition of all sel- 
fish isolation in parishes or individuals, all withdrawal from shar- 
ing the cares and burdens of the whole; in short to realize our 
theory of a brotherhood in life, and not merely in talk and preach- 
ing, is one necessity which, in fact, embraces all other necessities, 
and which, if supplied, would supply all the rest. 

We are not the largest body in the country, but if we were the 
united body we ought to be, frankly, openly brethren of one fam- 
ily — we should find our effectiveness, without one more addition, 
multiplied by ten. 

Can't we clasp hands like Christians and like Churchmen all, 
and make ourselves something like our professions? 



IGNORANCE AND THOUGHTLESSNESS. 

TTOW far is ignorance an excuse for wrong ? 
*■*• How far does thoughtlessness excuse sin? 

That a sin done knowingly, with full understanding of its nature 
and its consequences, done presumptuously and defiantly, entails 
greater guilt, and does deeper moral wrong to the doer, the com- 
mon sense of all men will admit. 

To blunder into evil, is surely not so bad as to march into it 
with open eyes. To be enslaved by sin through thoughtlessness 
is not so great a depravity as to choose sin deliberately, knowing 
it and seeing it. 

And yet those who sin boldly, defiantly, knowingly, who take 
evil to their hearts because it is evil and not good, are very few. 
Of the hosts that fall before the tempter, very few fall with their 
eyes open to the full meaning of the temptation. It is rare indeed 
that the wrong-doer cannot enter in plea of abatement, either 
ignorance or thoughtlessness. 

How far do these pleas avail ? They are often offered as if they 
were quite sufficient for the removal of guilt. It is easy to see 
that they do not go to that length. The common sense of man- 
kind refuses to condone a crime in a grown up and rational 
human being, merely because he or she was ignorant that it was 
a crime. Much less does it condone it merely because it was 
done thoughtlessly or carelessly. 

And the ground on which the common conscience acts in this 
matter is plain enough when one considers. 

Take the plea of thoughtlessness. " I have done wrong," says 
the guilty party, " but I did not mean to do it. I did not consider 
or weigh the act or its consequences. I blundered into guilt un- 
intentionally. Had I seen it as I do now, had I known what I 
know now, I should never have done the wrong." 

The answer to this is, "You had no business to be thoughtless. 
Your carelessness was in itself an antecedent wrong. Judgment, 
conscience, reason, sense are given you in this world to use, to 

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Ignorance and Thoughtlessness. 59 

guide your actions by, to direct your steps by. They are here on 
probation, here to be trained, strengthened, developed. You are 
responsible for their possession and their use. You are inex- 
cusable if you did not use them, if you threw them away when 
you most needed them." 

That was the first sin, the other followed as a consequence. 
God does not mean that men shall be thoughtless or careless. He 
holds them responsible for their actions, and that responsibility 
binds them over to both thought and care. 

Unless they watch, unless they consider, they fail in worldly 
things. Thoughtlessness and carelessness work ruin in business, 
bringing a man to bankruptcy and beggary. He is bound by every 
consideration to be both thoughtful and careful. His whole pros- 
perity and security in life depend upon his being so. A man's 
prudence and forethought are put on trial by the needs of life all 
the time, because both of these qualities are excellent, manly, 
moral qualities and necessary for human well-being. If a man 
waste his fortune thoughtlessly, if he ruin his business recklessly 
or carelessly, if he destroy his worldly well-being by lack of self- 
control, the ruin and the wrong are just as bitter as if all had been 
done by deliberate malice and of set purpose. The fear of the 
ruin was the very thing that should have trained him in pru- 
dence, forethought, and self restraint. 

Just so with sin or moral wrong. A man is likely to fall into 
sin, to go to moral ruin from rashness or carelessness. The fear 
of that result should hold him back, and is intended to hold him 
back from both. Because there is danger of moral ruin, a man 
should take heed to his steps ; should be wary and watchful and 
self-restrained, should think before he speaks, and have his wits 
about him before he acts. 

Instead, therefore, of making carelessness and thoughtlessness 
an excuse for sin, we make them sins themselves. In this solemn 
life, with all its solemn issues, the man who is careless, thought- 
less, reckless, is living in sin. He stands already condemned be- 
cause of his condition. He is held responsible at any equal bar. 

Take ignorance in the same way. A man is given eyes to see 
and ears to hear and a brain to think. Close about lie things 
which affect his dearest interests. His life, in all that makes life 
valuable, depends upon his knowing those things, upon his full 
and clear understanding of those facts. He is under bonds to be 



60 Ignorance and Thoughtlessness. 

well informed. It is at his peril if he fail? to know all there is to 
be known of what so closely concerns his life. 

If through laziness or stupidity he is content to be ignorant, his 
ignorance will be no excuse for his failure. When his ignorance 
wrecks his own fortune and the fortune of others, he is not ex- 
cused, he does not get off free because of it. His ignorance was, 
i'self, his fi rst wrong. He is already condemned for that. He was 
bound to know the responsibilities he carried, bound to understand 
his business, bound not to blunder ignorantly in conducting it, and 
the common sense of mankind holds him to a strict account- 
ability. 

If, indeed, the ignorance be unavoidable, if a man could not 
overcome it, had no means of setting himself right, then, though 
he will still suffer loss all the same, we do not blame him for a 
moral lapse. We pity him rather. 

Now, in the moral guiding of a man's life, in the interests that 
are most permanent and most personal, a man is under bonds to 
know what he is about. He is pledged by the responsibilities of 
life, to be neither reckless nor ignorant. He has the means of 
information and is bound to be informed. He is walking a road 
beset with danger and is bound to walk warily. 

But he sins. He says he did not know it was a sin, at least not 
so great a sin as he sees it. He was ignorant of the meaning and 
effect of his act. 

The answer to him is that it was his business not to be igno- 
rant. He is putting in a plea that is worthless. He is confessing 
himself a traitor to the obligations of his place. 

If, indeed, his ignorance was invincible, an ignorance which no 
study or thought of his could remove, an ignorance imposed and 
bound upon him by unconquerable circumstances, that is another 
master. But such ignorance, when it conies to right and wrong, 
is rare. The ignorance that does not know a sin to be a sin is an 
ignorance with which we will seldom be called to deal in a Chris- 
tian country. 

The truth is ignorance, which is so often pleaded an excuse for 
sin, is often an ignorance of choice, as a thing a man works for, 
and sometimes works hard for. 

Tampering with conscience, excusing wrong, veiling moral evil, 
making it a slight thing, arguing with oneself that the act is not so 
bad after all, that at least in these circumstances, and at this time 



Ignorance and Thoughtlessness. 61 

it is different from what it would be otherwise — these are the 
things which produce moral ignorance. A man takes the devil's 
part against himself, turns tempter to himself, puts lies on his own 
judgment and sophisticates his own conscience, and then finds that 
he does not know a sin to be a sin, or recognize a wrong for a 
wrong. 

That sort of ignorance is itself an aggravation of the sin, a re- 
sult of a moral degradation which makes possible all sins. 

And yet it is the common ignorance, this, which comes from 
deliberately confounding everlasting distinctions, from putting 
darkness for light, and curses for blessings, from voluntarily sur- 
rendering conscience to the devil, and making a compact with evil 
that it may rule. 

It is the last state of spiritual ruin, this in which a man is con- 
tent to cheat himself wilfully. He is far on the downward road, 
and fast travelling it to its end. Ignorance ! His ignorance, in- 
stead of excusing his sin, is proof that he is now capable, and will- 
ing to be capable, of all sins, because he chooses darkness and not 
light. 

The one thing which a soul wants to do, if it has any desire to 
go up and not down, is to stand by the facts of the case at all 
hazards. If a man chooses to do wrong, let him be honest to his 
own soul, not trying to cheat himself into a belief that his wrong 
is right. Let him accept his wrong and the consequences. If a 
man will go the road to the pit, let him not lie himself into the 
notion that he is going to heaven. Since he has chosen that road, 
let him be honest and confess its ending. 

The most imbecile thing we can imagine is for a man to serve 
the devil faithfully, and then when caught, by way of excuse, with 
a surprised look of innocence and simplicity to cry out, " Oh ! I 
was ignorant, a helpless innocent, I thought he was God all the 
time." 

It is about what the plea of ignorance usually amounts to. 



MAKE-SHIFTS. 

TT is wonderful how little downright honesty men have in deal- 
■*- ing either with themselves or others, how hard it is for men 
to face the facts and meet them as they are. 

We are forever concealing, covering up, explaining away. We 
refuse to see the thing just as it is. We give it another name if 
we can do no better, and imagine that the new name has, some- 
how, conferred a new nature. The laborious way in which people 
lie to themselves is one of the saddest things we know. 

Did ever a sinner actually face his sin honestly and call it by 
its honest name? Surely never, unless led by the grace of God. 
Till he is so led to real self-knowledge and downright, real repent- 
ance, he is always excusing, always making apologies, always, if 
he can do no better, inventing softer names for it, and baptizing 
the foul birth of hell with an alias. 

It might be supposed that if honesty were to be found any- 
where it would be found in religion. And yet, possibly, nowhere 
are men more dishonest, nowhere do they less face the fact, 
nowhere are they more deluded by make-shifts than in matters 
religious. 

Take the whole mass of men who are living lives whose only 
end is spiritual ruin, men who are devoted to the world, their 
own flesh, or the devil, men who have voluntarily chosen one of 
these for their master and are zealously serving the lord of their 
choice. How seldom will you find one of these men who will be 
honest with himself and look to the master he serves for his re- 
ward. 

He has always some excuse, some prevarication, some cheating 
make-shift to make him think that he may serve the devil and 
yet look for his pay from God. It may be some childish talk 
about God's mercy which denies God's justice, it may be some 
special excuse which he fancies in his own case, but we have yet 

(62) 



Make-Shifts. 63 

to meet the man who is honest enough to look to the devil for 
his full pay for faithful devil's service and be content ! 

But it is not only in the matter of their personal action that 
men are cheating themselves in religion; they do it just the same 
in matters not personal, in points of belief and points of practice 
which belong to the Church as a body. 

There are difficulties in the way of the working of Christianity, 
both practical and theoretical, there are difficulties in the way of 
the working of the Church. We all meet them. We are all 
troubled by them. We are all, or we ought to be, anxious to re- 
move them. How do we deal with them generally ? As a rule 
we meet the difficulty with a make-shift. Instead of facing it 
honestly and squarely, and refusing to pass it by until it is righted, 
we invent some contrivance which shall tide us over it, which 
will do for the moment, which shall blind us to its existence and 
leave the real difficulty to stand and work increasing evil for the 
future. 

Take the fact of a divided Christendom. We suppose no sane 
Christian can help seeing that this is not what the Lord wills, that 
He made provision for a totally other state of things than this, 
that He prayed against it, warned against it, as did His Apostles 
after Him, that the thing is evil, wasteful, paralyzing, that it is 
the thing which, to-day, stands in the way of the world's conver- 
sion. What do we with it ? We invent the make shift of " invis- 
ible unity," and excuse the whole thing by talk of an "invisible 
Church!'' 

There stands the hard, bitter, evil fact. There stand our Lord's 
prayers and warnings against it. There stand the burning words 
of His great apostle. Men refuse to face the fact, refuse to do 
any honest thing to mend it, refuse to stand as they ought to 
stand, self-condemned, before it, praying for pardon, help and 
light; cheat themselves by the delusion of a fine phrase, and go 
on their road imagining that they have removed the evil because 
they have given it a new name. 

In the old days the Lord Himself called that sort of thing 
"making the word of God of none effect through your traditions." 
W T e are not aware that He would call it anything other in modern 
days. 

Or, again, we have the plain command to carry the Gospel to 
all people. We are plainly told that our Lord redeemed all, that 



64 Make-Shifts. 

the message of His Church is to all. How do we meet this? We 
build churches and rent out or sell cut their floors, to a select few. 

We keep the Gospel for these select few — a private luxury — and 
practically, sometimes intentionally, by the very arrangement it- 
self, shut out the people to whom we are sent. 

That is the evil. The thing is plain and distinct before our eyes. 
It is one of the greatest and most serious practical difficulties that 
stand in our way in this country, one w T hich, as long as it remains, 
bars the way against the footsteps of right advance. 

What do we do with it? We shut our eyes to it; generally. We 
say there is no other way of supporting a parish. We remark that 
our time and country are peculiar and that this is the only method 
for us. Or we build here and there a pauper church, or set apart 
a half-dozen free pews at the door. In some way, we make a com- 
promise with the difficulty, and put our faith in a make- shift, and 
hope the thing will last our day, and "after us the deluge." 

Here is another illustration of precisely the same spirit. We 
have been so miserably penurious, or so wilfully blind, that it is 
impossible, in our larger cities, to perform the Burial Service over 
our dead. We have provided no cemeteries, no mortuary chap- 
els, and the parish clergy, in the cities, simply cannot go to the 
public cemeteries situated six or eight miles from the church, to 
commit the body to the ground. 

So, instead of facing the difficulty, confessing our own failure in 
this matter, like men, and turning about to remedy it, we content 
ourselves with a make-shift, make a supposititious committal, and 
leave the undertakers' men and grave-diggers to do the rest! 

Sponsors, parents and pastors, in the intention of the Church 
are held responsible, solemnly made so, for the Christian educa- 
tion of baptized children. But all fail in the duty, one from pure 
neglect and sinful carelessness, and the other because we require 
so much of other wasteful work from the pastor, that he has no 
time to attend to the children. 

And here, also, instead of facing the hard, unpleasant fact, in- 
stead of confessing, and seeking honestly to remove our own care- 
lessness and failure, we content ourselves with the make-shift of 
the Sunday school ; and transfer our children to the hands of irre- 
sponsible volunteers. Carrying out the same system of make- 
shift, we let our boys, especially, slip out of our hands, when they 
are just entering manhood, because the same make-shift of the 



Make-Shifts. 65 

Sunday school blinds us to the lack of real honest schools under 
our own care, parish schools, and such like, where religion is 
taught, as if it were really a matter of some consequence. 

So everywhere, and in a dozen instances, we are content to live 
from hand to mouth, using temporary expedients, cheap pallia- 
tives, poor make-shifts, thinking that if we have concealed an evil 
or postponed a difficulty, we have as good as removed it. 

Now, the evil of make-shifts cuts deeper in religion than any- 
where else. In the first place it introduces an element of unreal- 
ity and insincerity where, above all, all things should be real and 
sincere. It vitiates religion all through, in a man or in a church. 
It is a covenant with lies, and makes one uncertain of all truth 
and reality. 

And, in the second place, it postpones, indefinitely, any real re- 
formation. We become content with the make-shift. 

We get on with it after a fashion, and forget the existence of the 
evil which we have so carefully cloaked and concealed. 

There is only one course here for an honest man or an honest 
church, and that is boldly and honestly to face an acknowledged 
failure or an acknowledged wrong, stubbornly refuse to call it by 
anything but its right name, resist all inducements to cloak it with 
a pretence, and all attempts to disguise it by any make-shift, no 
matter how ingenious. 

This is a very serious sort of world, after all, and it is a very se- 
rious bit of business to live and do one's duty in it. It is all that, 
for a church or a man. Above all things, it is necessary to see 
things as they are, to be clear-eyed and clear-brained, that one may 
know his friends and know his foes, and consequently know his 
work and warfare. 

Make-shifts are a delusion and a snare of the devil, everywhere. 
They are emphatically so in matters of personal religion or in the 
line of churchly duty, and every honest Christian should hate 
them cordially, and express his hatred, as we do here, at all fit 
times and in all fit places. 



THE SUNDAY SCHOOL IDEA. 

rfVHE Church, like her neighbors, has Sunday schools. Whether 
-*■ they are the best arrangement for doing her work or not, we 
shall not here discuss. We take the fact that she has them, and 
finds, of course, some use in them. As far as they go she is work- 
ing just as her neighbors work, with an institution which is just 
like theirs. 

We inquire what her purpose is in its use ? What does she pro- 
pose to effect with the Sunday school ? Is her aim the same as 
that of the denominations ? In short, what is her " Sunday school 
idea." 

We confess we think these questions important. It is surely de- 
sirable to have a clear idea of our purpose in the use of any in- 
strument. And we are far from certain that there is a very clear 
idea about the purpose of this one. It has seemed to us that Sun- 
day schools are conducted as if they themselves were their own 
sufficient excuse. Our parishes have Sunday schools because other 
people have them, because it is the right thing to have them, be- 
cause Sunday schools are good things in themselves. It has not 
seemed to us that the Sunday school is worked with a definite pur- 
pose for a definite result, and is to be held valuable only according 
to the extent in which it reaches that result. 

Therefore comes the vagueness about the manner of conducting 
Sunday schools, the experiments in methods of instruction, the 
copying of plans from this side and that, the uncertain feeling 
about all plans at last, and the more and more certain feeling that 
the Sunday school is more or less a failure. 

Were there a clear and reasonable understanding of the purpose 
sought, were the Sunday school worked for that purpose, and were 
it felt to be successful where that purpose is attained, were it used 
for what it can do and not for what it can not do, there would be 
less disappointment and more consistency. 

(66) 



The Sunday School Idea. . 67 

We have said the Church, like her neighbors, has Sunday 
schools. Her purpose, however, cannot be theirs — in their use. 
Their theory of Christian training is one thing, and hers is quite 
another. It would seem that this consideration ought of itself to 
rule out the inconsiderateness which we observe in some quarters, 
and which leads our Sunday school managers to copy the methods 
and even adopt the lessons of other people's Sunday schools. 

Our theory about the position of our children and their relation 
to the Church and Christianity is one thing. The theory of our 
neighbors is quite another thing. We start from one principle in 
the training of children, and they from another. Now if we use 
the Sunday school for the purpose of that training we must man- 
age our Sunday school, it would seem, quite differently from what 
they do theirs. 

For no matter what be the statements of their standards or their 
more conservative and scientific theologians, the popular, practical 
and accepted principle is that children are not members of the 
Church. Whether they are baptized or unbaptized is all one. Be- 
fore becoming members of the Church they must be " converted." 
A certain process, which takes place usually, if it takes place at ail 
in adult years, must first be gone through with, and it is this pro- 
cess which in the opinion of " the Evangelical denominations" 
makes one a member of God's Church, and so entitles him to be 
received as a member in any sect of man's. 

The Baptist aljne accepts this principle in its full logical results, 
and, in consequence, refuses to baptize children. He rightly, 
therefore, instructs a chill on the distinct understanding that he is 
not, and cannot be a Christian as yet. He is consistent in this. 
But his humanity gets the better of his divinity, and instead of 
holding, as he is logically bound to do, that since the chill cannot 
be a Christian, therefore he cannot be saved, he makes an excep- 
tion in his case and generally concedes that while a man cannot 
be saved without being a Christian, a child may be. To be sure, 
it seems very queer that a soul good enough to go to heaven is not 
also good enough to be a member of the Baptist church. But that 
is or.ly another instance of what we see so commonly, the refusal 
to carry out principles to unpleasant consequences. Human na- 
ture is, very often, better than its creeds, and effectually protests 
against the logic of those creeds when they outrage it too bitterly. 
At all events the result is the very remarkable one that, on their 



08 - The Sunday School Idea. 

own principles, there are but two place3 in the universe whence 
children, because they are children, are hopelessly excluded — hell, 
and the Baptist church. Other " Evangelical denominations" are 
not even so logical as our Baptist friends, and while nominally 
they accept children as members of their churches, and generally 
hold them fit to go to heaven when they die, nevertheless, practi- 
cally deny them membership in God's Church, because they are 
not yet converted. Indeed, the results, logically, of fragmentary 
bits of Calvinism are very queer and inconsequential generally. 
It is a system which must be taken as a whole or not at all. And, 
taken as a whole, while it is not a thing to fall in love with, it is 
something for which one cannot help having high respect. 

In the "Evangelical denominations" then "the Sunday school 
idea," if there be any clearness or consistency about it, is that the 
Sunday school is a place to help a child to get " converted." We 
question whether this is distinctly set forth as the aim in all 
cases. Generally we suspect it is not. Christianity is taught, as 
much of it as is taught at all, as an intellectual matter. Person- 
ally it does not concern the child yet because he is not a Chris- 
tian. It may concern him sometime, when he becomes a Chris- 
tian as it is hoped he will. But now he is outside the covenant, 
outside of its privileges, and outside of its duties as well. He looks 
at it from the outside and his teachers teach him to do so. 

He is, as the final end, preparing to be " converted." A " re- 
vival " is sought in the Sunday school for that purpose. Emotional 
hymns form a large part of the exercises. There is, in many Sun- 
day schools, more singing than teaching. Emotional preachers 
are sought to address him, and they address him in the dialect of 
the system. When he has "met with a change " or "experienced 
a hope" or "got religion," he is fit to be taken out of the outer 
court of the Sunday school and introduced, in full membership, 
into the Church. 

The Sunday school, therefore, on this idea, is no part of the 
Church at all. The two things are quite distinct. In the Sunday 
school she is dealing with those outside the covenant, as really as 
when she preaches to the heathen. Her purpose is to persuade 
the children to become Christians. 

But, here, to embarrass the matter still further, comes in the 
little scrap of Calvinism, "the effectual call," under another 
name, teaching all concerned that there is no certainty in the 



The Sunday School Idea. 69 

result, that God alone makes men or children Christians in His own 
good time, and that human help can neither seriously advance 
nor retard that consummation. At best we can only increase the 
chances. 

Now the Church, on the other hand, boldly and plainly teaches 
that children may be, and ought to be, members of the Church, 
that all baptized children are so, that they are inside the covenant, 
with all its duties and all its privileges. 

Her children, therefore, have the right to Christian teaching, 
because they are Christians. Her instruction begins on the prin- 
ciple that they are children of God, and not of the devil. Chris- 
tianity is something which personally and particularly concerns 
each one of them. 

Moreover it is something which the Church owes them. She 
cannot withhold it on her peril. It was pledged to them at their 
baptism. The Church's honor is engaged in the contract. She 
would be just as right in closing her churches, in suspending her 
sacraments, in ceasing the preaching of the Gospel as in ceasing 
to instruct her children. It is a work with her, inside and not 
outside, a work among her own members for her own sake. 

She has provided for this work by providing a course of instruc- 
tion for her children, andlaying on sponsors, parents and pastors 
the duty of seeing it fulfilled. The public catechising in the 
Church is a venerable institution. It existed, and did its work 
ages before Sunday schools were thought of. We are by no means 
sure that Sunday schools have quite succeeded in filling its place, 
or that it might not be made, to-day, an exercise of the greatest 
profit and interest to the children and the grown people as well. 

To the Church with these principles and this provision comes 
the Sunday school. What must be the "idea" of it? Manifestly 
it must be one which works harmoniously with her other ideas 
and with her principles. 

If it be considered a help to parents and pastors and sponsors 
in the fulfillment of their duty to the children, or if it be con- 
sidered an institution to which they surrender that duty, it is still 
the same in its purpose. It still has a definite work before it. 
That work must be the one which the Church pledges her honor 
at the font for — the teaching the child the principles of the Chris- 
tian faith because the child is a Christian. 

There can be nothing plainer than the course laid down by the 



70 The Sunday School Idea. 

Church. It is definite and straightforward, and its end is clear 
from the beginning. "Ye are to see that this child be brought to 
the bishop to be confirmed by him," etc., that is the end. The 
child is a member of the Church. His age prevents his perform- 
ance, even his understanding, of the full duties of his position. 
Eat those full duties and full privileges, too, are his when the 
time comes. He is under training to perform those duties and 
use those privileges rightly. Confirmation is set out as the solemn 
rite which shall put him under both. He is therefore in training 
for confirmation. 

Now, whatever place we give the Sunday school, its " idea" 
with us is, that it is helping to prepare children for confirmation. 
When the child has the bishop's hands laid upon him the Sunday 
school has done its work for him, and not before. 

We must remember, indeed, that it is an institution we are 
using at our own risk. The responsible parties are parents, 
sponsors and pastors. On them the Church lays the duty of car- 
ing for the children. If they see fit to transfer this duty or any 
part of it to irresponsible volunteers, they do so at their own risk. 
The Sunday school, with us, can only be considered as the assist- 
ant of these responsible parties. But manifestly whatever be 
their work that also must be the work of the Sunday school. 
There is only one kind of work which the Church demands shall 
be done for her children. The Sunday school cannot change it. 

If we are right in all this it would seem to follow that there is 
no need of experimenting. The business of our Sunday school 
is not to amuse the children, delight them or entertain them. It 
is not to teach them hymns or keep them singing, marching or 
reciting. The Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Command- 
ments — to believe as Christians, to worship as Christians, to live 
as Christians — to teach these is the one business in our Sunday 
schools. Other things may come in, helpful, illustrative, but our 
Sunday school is a catechetical school, a school to teach definite 
doctrine, definite faith, a definite line of duty to those who are 
under obligations to them all. 

Now, just so far as our Sunday schools are training children for 
confirmation and first Communion, so far and no farther, are 
they fulfilling the only possible end for which they are justified in 
existing. Their numbers will not tell us their prosperity, neither 
will the amount of their offerings, nor the glory of their festivals, 



The Sunday School Idea. 71 

picnics and Christmas trees. Those things, we fear, are often 
taken as the end in themselves. Instead of being of any use, 
they may be of positive harm. And mistake here is the cause of 
much of the unfruitfulness of these schools. 

Here is something which the pastor must answer for. Is his 
Sunday school regularly sending a well-instructed class of young 
people to the bishop? Is it definitely training children up as 
Christians because it believes they can be so trained, and God 
means they should be ? Is it really doing the work which he 
and the sponsors and the parents of his parish are bound for tak- 
ing care, namely, that these children be brought to the bishop to 
be confirmed by him ? 

If it be not doing this, he may be keeping up a Sunday school 
for custom's sake, or because others do it, or to interest the chil- 
dren, but he is not keeping it up on the only idea which justifies 
its existence among us as a substitute for parental and sponsorial 
teaching and the bounden duty of public catechising by the 
pastor. 



"O YE OF LITTLE FAITH." 

A MAN may be in a body and not of it. He may be a member 
"^ to the eye, and yet have no part of the body's spirit. 

There is a class of people in the Church who are objects of real 
pity. They are "Episcopalians." They "love the Church." 
They " admire her beautiful liturgy," etc. But they are unhappy 
in their position. They eajoy their good things with fear and 
trembling. They are in a chronic state of blind terror and sus- 
picion. They are afraid of the body of which they are members. 

We all know this unhappy class. We trust it is growing smaller 
by degrees, but, it would seem that, as it grows smaller it grows 
noisier. Its wailings were never louder, shriller and more per- 
sistent than at present. 

Every step the Church takes in advance draws a cry from these 
fearful souls. Every new movement is, to them, another step on 
ruin's downward path. Every new diocese organized is an in- 
stance of our rapid decay. Every new church built, is, in some 
of its arrangements, a cause of suspicion and fear. Every mis- 
sionary meeting or convocation is attended with an accompani- 
ment of dirges and misereres from these trembling souls, who see 
nothing but danger anywhere. 

They stand round the Church with white terror in their eyes, 
with blanched cheeks and quivering lips. The Church lifts her 
hand and they forthwith cry : " She moves ! She is crazy ! Bring 
a rope somebody. Tie her fast. Tie her quick. Oh dear, what 
shall we do?" 

She opens her mouth and speaks. There is another scream 
of fear : " Gag her quickly. Choke her, somebody ! We shall 
all be ruined. Don't you see she is actually going to say some- 
thing? Alas, alas, how shall we avert this ruin ?" 

She lifts her foot and steps forward. Then the writhing agony 
almost turns to dead horror. "She is actually walking. This 
wild Church — this terrible unruly Church. She is loose and 

(72) 



"O Ye of Little Faith." 73 

travelling ! Oh, what shall we do ? R ~>pes, fetters, handcuffs, pad- 
locks, bring them all, and quickly ! She is going, don't you see? 
She will soon begone. To Some?— (whisper it low). Who knows? 
She is going anyway, and nobody knows where she will stop. 
Knock her down quickly, tie her hand and foot ; and if they ask 
you what you are doing, tell them she ivas certainly going to that 
awful place." 

The existence of this unhappy class has been the greatest draw- 
back, we know, upon the Church's progress — the alarmists, the 
shrieking terrorists, that have made a business of frightening men 
and women, as they are frightened themselves, at their own 
shadows. 

One gets naturally indignant with them, and yet they are really 
rather to be pitied. How unhappy must be their lives ! They 
are in a body in which they have no faith. They are in chronic 
fear of the body's tendencies, temper and spirit. They go with it 
because they are dragged. They protest against themselves and 
their own position every day, and yet fiad no means of deliverance. 

We certainly know no class of people more deserving of pity 
and forbearance than this. 

If a strong man found himself in a body whose purposes he dis- 
trusted, whose aims he feared, he would, of course, leave the body, 
and find another where he could work in peace and hope. But 
these brethren are not strong. They are very weak. They have 
just "love" enough for the Church to make them compromise 
with fear. They have just " attachment " enough to some of her 
qualities to induce them to cling to their uneasy and unhappy 
position. 

They have no faith in the Church of which they are members. 
They have, on the other hand, downright distrust. They do not 
comprehend her spirit or her character. She is a riddle too hard 
for them to read; and the thing we do not know is always terrible. 

So it becomes the struggle of their lives to keep her just where 
she is, to prevent any step or movement, to cry out that all is lost, 
if they detect the slightest sign of any tendency to go forward. 
And, in these days, they are finding cause enough for alarm. 
Their lives must be indeed unhappy. There are so many things 
said, and so many things done, such evidence of teeming life, such 
a disposition to snap all fetters and stride onwards, such an irre- 
sistible impulse to do the day's work given with both hands, the 



74 "O Ye of Little Faith." 

Church is so clearly showing herself too large for sect clothing, too 
Catholic for sect measures, that these souls of little faith are having 
a very restless time of it. Their small cries of alarm are rising on 
all sides; and now, alas, nobody heeds them! 

We counsel quietness and confidence. The Church is very sure 
of her position and of her course. We have only to commit our- 
selves fearlessly to the body and work with it. Let the alarmists 
have their little shriek if it brings them any comfort. Only let the 
rest of us go quietly on and do our duty. We have no time now 
to attend to their unreasonable fears. We are all in motion. That 
is just what we want. The Church is striding forward. We have 
perfect confidence in the road she will take. She has travelled it 
for a great many years, and knows it pretty well. She walked it 
before our terror-stricken brethren w T ere born, and will go on walk- 
ing it when their timid souls are comforted, for all life's fears, in 
the joys of Paradise. 

Put faith in the Church of God, and work with her, not against 
her. Help her, do not obstruct her. Be sensible, practical and 
courageous as she is, and the race of the alarmists will find their 
occupation gone. 



EUTHANASIA AND THE SCIENTISTS. 

THE world has been perhaps more amused than shocked at the 
*- proposal, seriously made, however, by some philosophical 
gentlemen in England, that in certain cases of hopeless disease, 
or imbecile old age, physicians should be authorized to put a 
quiet end to the patient with a dose of morphine or chloroform. 

The business, of course, is to be conducted under proper guards 
and restrictions. All securities are to be taken, that the case is 
hopeless, or that the victim's usefulness is over, and we believe it 
was even proposed to ask his consent, that is, if he still retained 
his faculties, we suppose. But when the preliminaries are all com- 
plied with, in the presence of the sorrowing wife and weeping 
children, the doctor is to give his powder of forgetfulness to the 
beloved husband and father suffering with softening of the brain, 
or stricken with paralysis, and get him quietly ready for the un- 
dertaker according to appointment. The clergyman also would 
be present to pray for the dying and to comfort the stricken and 
sorrowing family. 

When a man's father becomes toothless and childish the son 
will lovingly give him the happy despatch and enter on posses- 
sion of his estatas. When the mother becomes feeble and old 
the loving daughter, with her own gentle hands, will drop into 
the spoon and carry to the lips that kissed her baby face, the 
precious dose that will put the dear old soul out of the way of 
troubling her longer. The tender mother will carefully prepare 
the drops for poor little crippled Charlie, whose careless nurse let 
him fall down stairs while his dear mother was at the opera, and 
the same dear mother will gaze, with tear3 in her eyes, at the last 
shudder of the dear child's body before he ceases to be a worry to 
her any more. 

In fact, the most tender pity and love will stand by all sick- 
beds, and as soon as the doctor says " the case is hopeless," or, 
" if he recover he will be a burden, a cripple or weak-minded," 

(75) 



76 Euthanasia and the Scientists. 

they will tearfully administer the gentle drug and put the sufferer 
out of his pain. 

We shall have no more cripples, no more imbeciles, no more 
old people. The law of " the survival of the fittest" will be in 
full operation. It will be a world of strong, young, hearty peo- 
ple who enjoy life to the fullest. Hospitals and asylums will be 
things of the past, and we do not see but that in the end the doc- 
tors themselves will have nothing to do except preside over the 
affectionate poisoning of their patients. 

This is what is called Euthanasia — which is Greek for Happy 
Despatch, Filial Poisoning or Connubial Execution. 

The grotesque horror of the proposition is what seems to have 
struck everybody. The fact that it is a serious proposition and 
grows naturally out of the prevailing " philosophy," has not at- 
tracted the attention that such a startling fact deserves. 

It has been and is, perhaps, still the custom in various savage 
tribes, to practice just this Euthanasia. Where a man's grand- 
father or grandmother becomes a burden, subject to that most in- 
curable of all diseases, old age, it is the custom to knock the old 
gentleman or lady on the head, and in some tribes, we believe, to 
give a supper afterward, and invite the friends and relatives to eat 
the defunct. In Sparta they used to strangle all the children who 
were not robust and well-formed. 

The proposal by the English philosophers is therefore not origi- 
nal, and need not be startling. The plan has been tried, and with 
more or less success in the opinion of those who tried it. The cu- 
rious thing about it is that a savage and pagan custom should be 
advocated seriously in England at the close of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. We may concede that there is much to be said for it. From 
the point of view of the materialists, there is everything to be 
said for it. The proposal is a logical result of what has been call- 
ing itself " science" for the last few years, and on the basis of that 
science its wisdom is unassailable. 

If man be a development from the primeval slime, an improved 
oyster or ape, we fail to see where there is any room to talk about 
"the sacredness of human life." There is nothing "sacred" in 
nature. Certainly she treats life with very scant reverence, be it 
vegetable or animal. In no " law of nature" do wc find a hint 
that there is any sacredness in mere existence. Nature's forces 
ruthlessly trample out and trample down life in all its forms. She 



Euthanasia and the Scientists. 77 

is the bloodiest handed of all niurderei*3. She ravens beak and 
claw. 

Man esteems his own life highly. But it is a delusion to trans- 
fer his own estimate of himself to nature. She wipes him out 
with as little sense of his dignity, as little feeling of pity for him, 
as if he were a bit of sea-weed or an insect. Material nature, and 
it is cf that we speak, and from that the scientists of whom we 
speak insist we shall get all our " science," has no more regard for 
human life than for the life of the mushroom or of the gnat. If 
man be the product only of material nature, an outgrowth of the 
everlasting ooze, there is no ground for esteeming his life more 
sacred than the ooze from which he springs, more valuable than 
any other of its products. Things can rise no higher than their 
source, and if man be but an expression of nature's force, he must 
take his chances with the rest of such expressions. To esteem it 
any moral wrong to deprive him of life, is but a superstition de- 
rived from an obsolete faith in the supernatural. To value his life 
beyond what material results it produces, is to act most unscien- 
tifically. To esteem it a gift worth preserving, when the man's 
active work is over, and he is a burden on other men, is a delusion 
that still lingers from the influence of a Christianity which all sci- 
entific men have agreed to consider effete. 

Christianity set men on building hospitals to cure disease, asy- 
lums to nurse till they died those who are given up as incurable. 
It has exhorted men and women to the care of the old, the help- 
less, the suffering, the imbecile, as a most humane as well as 
Christian work. It has sought to mitigate the sore distress of hope- 
less pain and slow disease by patient devotion and tender nursing. 

Philosophically, all this has been a gross mistake. Every hos- 
pital is a breach of " natural law." Every asylum for hopeless 
human disease of mind or body is in direct violation of the great 
enactment, " Survival of the fittest" — the grand discovery of our 
time. What right have we to complain of anything thathasgone 
w r rong with us, when we have been ruthlessly trampling on the 
great foundation laws of life, as patiently explained (o us by Mr. 
Spencer and Mr. Darwin? How can we expect to prosper if we 
continue obstinate in our rebellion, insisting that the weakest shall 
not go to the wall, that the most unfit shall survive, if skill and 
care can make him ? That the cripple shall live, the imbecile 
shall be fed, cared for, taught as far as may be, and helped to live? 



78 Euthanasia and the Scientists. 

That the hopelessly insane even shall be nursed with the tender- 
ness a mother gives a child ? That the blind shall not be straight- 
way poisoned, but shall be helped to grope his poor, dark way as 
long as possible ? 

Oar entire Christian civilization needs reconstruction. It has 
no "scientific" basis. It is, on the other hand, opposed to every 
so-called "scientific discovery" of our speculative materialists. 
They have been warning us for some time now and we have hith- 
erto refused to be warned, and the penalty we endure for our 
breach of " law" is a population largely composed of weak, un- 
healthy, wretchedly poor and suffering people whom we have 
persisted in keeping alive. If we had but taken the more scien- 
tific method of the savage and drowned our cripples, or at least 
let them die, if we had allowed the lame and the blind, the imbe- 
cile and the insane, to come under the action of the " law," what a 
happy and healthy community we should this day be! "Nat- 
ural selection" would have preserved alive only the types that are 
best and noblest, and as it has developed us up so far from the 
mollusk to the man, if we had only let it work without our su- 
perstitious interferences, it would by this time have developed us, 
if not into angels, at least into Modocs. The beneficent law has 
been outraged and we have built temples to the honor of the out- 
rage. In every Christian land those relics of a superstitious and 
unscientific age, hospitals, asylums, refuges and the like, insult 
the scientific understanding and proclaim our rebellion against 
"law." 

The matter is perhaps too serious for jest. And yet it is not 
jest. That is the message to humanity which naturalism an- 
nounces. If we confine ourselves to what calls itself" science" — 
that is knowledge solely of material nature about us — we can find 
no other conclusion. There is nothing in it for man except cold- 
ness, cruelty and savagery. The strong have a right to live. The 
weak are born to be trampled out. The sooner the trampling 
out takes place, the more effectually it is done, the better is it for 
all concerned. 

Euthanasia is thoroughly "scientific." It is based on the 
" laws" which the " scientists" have been preaching as supreme. 
To that end mere naturalism leads at last. If there be no super- 
natural basis of life, if man be of the earth earthy, if he be merely 
an outgrowth of the dumb forces of matter, as scores of "scien- 



Euthanasia and the Scientists. 79 

tists" have been telling us in language more or less plain, if he 
be governed by inexorable material law, which is the highest and 
the only law, then it is wise and merciful to put him out of the 
way when he becomes a burden to himself or others. 

If our naturalism be true, then the blind, the lame, the hope- 
lessly sick, the old, the feeble, the imbecile, are most miserable. 
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," becomes the height 
of wisdom for men. 

What right has an old, worn-out man to exhaust the freshness 
and the energy of some young life? What right has a poor, sick, 
helpless creature to weary out the strong in demanding that its 
life shall be cared for when the plain law requires that death re- 
lieve it? There is no place in naturalism for a being who cannot 
take care of itself. 

It is quite as well that we should be accustomed to the logical 
consequences of some of our philosophies. The tradition of 
Christianity is so strong upon the most " advanced" of our wise 
men, that it holds them back from the carrying out of their prin- 
ciples. But here and there is one, and we should all be thankful 
to him, who is so intellectually constituted that he must carry a 
"law" to its issue, and by that issue let us see the nature of the 
law. 

The hint of what may be is given is the revival of the advo- 
cacy of suicide for the wretched and the putting to death of the 
helpless. Naturalism carried out comes to that conclusion. Mr. 
Herbert Spencer has been patiently laying down principles which 
scores, who think they think, are accepting without the slightest 
idea, on his part apparently or on theirs, that they are simple 
savagery and pure paganism, and that the man who dines off his 
aged mother has been acting on them, though Mr. Spencer's 
name has never been heard in his native speech. 

In some sense of the supernatural, in some faith in the unseen, 
in some feeling that man is not of this world, in some grasp on the 
Eternal God, and on an eternal supernatural and supersensuous 
life, lie the basis of all pity, and mercy, and help, and comfort, 
and patience, and sympathy among men. 

Set these aside, commit us only to the natural, to what our eyes 
see and our hands handle, and while we may organize society sci- 
entifically, and live according to " the laws of nature" and be very 
philosophical and very liberal, we are standing on the ground on 



80 Euthanasia and the Scientists. 

which every savage tribe stands, or indeed on which every pack 
of wolves gallops. 

One may safely say, " If you will show me on any principle of 
naturalism, or any rule of what you shallowly in these days call 
'philosophy,' on any ' law of nature' why I should not strangle 
my deaf and dumb child, smother my paralytic father, or drown 
my hopelessly insane wife, then I will turn materialist also." 

We are far from believing that gentlemen know how they have 
been undermining the foundations of civilized and social life. A 
lurid glare cast across these speculations, like this English discus- 
sion of Euthanasia, may startle some whom Mr. TyndalPs discus- 
sion of the scientific absurdity of prayer might not startle, though 
both are locked in one, and stand or fall together. But, however 
it be, we are sure that man will find that society stands on super- 
natural ground, that the family and the nation are divine, and that 
" naturalism" modified, or disguised as it may be, is only isolated 
savagery. "Every man for himself, and the weakest to the wall." 



EXCLUSIVENESS OF THE CHURCH. 

THE charge of exclusiveness is a common charge against the 
-*• Church. It is also considered one of the most damaging. 
According to popular opinion it is a very naughty thing to be ex- 
clusive ; at least, it is a very naughty thing in a Church. When 
our neighbors talk about " the exclusiveness of the Episcopal 
Church," therefore, they mean to say, that " the Episcopal Church 
is a very naughty Church indeed." 

We have looked over the Ten Commandments carefully, and 
we do not find " Thou shait not be exclusive," in any extant ver- 
sion. There is that much to comfort us. Exclusiveness is not a 
breach of the Decalogue. It may be very bad, but at all events it 
leaves the Commandments safe. 

Neither are we aware of any precept of the Old or New Testa- 
ment by which exclusiveness is condemned as a mortal sin. In- 
deed there are several texts in the New Testament, and the Old is 
full of them, which seem decidedly to encourage it, and in some 
sense, to make it a duty. Christians are called "a peculiar peo- 
ple." They are declared to be separate from the world. They are 
taught, in certain cases, to "shake off the dust of their feet" in sep- 
aration. They are instructed to " have no fellowship" with certain 
kinds of persons. 

It is hardly necessary to refer to the Old Testament for special 
Bible warrants for exclusiveness. The law and the prophets are 
full of warning in its favor, full of enactments to preserve it in its 
utmost rigor. God's people were neither to marry, nor live, nor 
eat, nor drink, with certain other people. Under no circumstances 
were they to allow those people to enter into the Congregation of 
the Lord. They were to shun them as men shun the pestilence. 

It is clear, then, that as far as the Bible is concerned, exclusive- 
ness is not per se a deadly sin. It is very possible there may be 
two or three other things as bad. Indeed, it is very possible, as far 
as the Bible reveals, that it may be positive righteousness. Our 
6 (81) 



82 EXCLUSIVENESS OF THE CHURCH. 

sensitive Church people should take matters easy. Even if the 
charge of exclusiveness be true, let them be thankful it is no 
worse. It was one of the most common charges against the early 
Church. 

Truth is always exclusive. It always shuts out error. When you 
prove two and two to be four, you are exclusive ; you exclude two 
and three, two and five, in short, every number plus two, save two 
itself ad infinitum. Establish any truth whatever, and you there- 
upon bar out all that contradicts it. 

It is not the exclusion, but the character of the thing excluded, 
which seems to be the important matter. It is undoubtedly a good 
thing to exclude error. We can scarcely do a better job than to 
shut out wrong. This sort of exclusiveness is a thing to be earn- 
estly desired. The exclusiveness of the Church, if our neighbors 
look a little closer, may be its very highest commendation. 

But why comes it that, to the popular feeling, exclusiveness is so 
ungracious? Because there are two kinds, w r e may answer, and 
they are confounded. The one, which is right and proper and 
necessary, comes in to share the odium of the other, which is mean, 
conceited and self-willed. The exclusiveness which is the effect of 
truth against error, is that of the Church. It is d* fensible, neces- 
sary, desirable. It never needs an apology. It is never ashamed 
of itself. It founds itself on clear distinctions, on eternal verities. 
It exists in the nature of things. 

There is another exclusiveness, which is that of Sectarianism. 
It exists outside the Church, and in a degree, inside. It is the 
exclusiveness of Phariseeism, of conceit, of smallness, of ignor- 
ance or vanity. It is hateful and contemptible. Now, as a fact, 
we know that this last is utterly anti-Church. The faith of a 
catholic Church is a broad, clear, simple faith. It is the an- 
nouncement of certain changeless verities, certain everlasting facts 
and realities. It is short, decisive, certain. All contradictory 
things, of course, are excluded. But they are excluded by a log- 
ical necessity. There is no choice on the subject, A catholic 
Christian believes in " God, the Father Almighty ;" as long as he 
has reason he cannot accept the man who denies God, or the 
Fatherhood of God, as being of the same faith as himself. 

As far as the Church excludes, then, she excludes whether she 
will or no. She cannot help herself, while she remains sane. 
She is not exclusive because she loves to be. It is no choice of 



EXCLUSIVENESS OF THE CHURCH. 83 

hers that she is so. It is the omnipotent necessity of truth. This 
exclusiveness is unselfish, is noble. It exists with the most glow- 
ing charity, with the most ardent affection, with the largest 
heartedness. 

But a sect excludes by another law. The sect chooses its faith. 
It makes its own doctrines, its own tests. It confesses those doc- 
trines and tests are not absolute or essential. They are merely its 
notions. Yet it excludes for them. It cuts itself off for them. It 
builds little walls and hedges for the sake of its small notions, or 
its Pharisaic holiness. 

For instance : The Church excludes no man who professes re- 
pentance and sincerity, and confesses his faith in the words of the 
common Creed of Christendom. She is exclusive of Jews, Moham- 
medans, Deists and Pagans, of course; but only then from logical 
necessity. She did not make her creed, as sects do. It was given 
her. She must live up to it. 

On the other hand, the Presbyterian Church excludes a vast 
variety of good Christian people, not because they deny any 
article of our common Creed, but because they do not accept 
certain peculiar views over and above. That is to say, the Pres- 
byterian accepts Christianity plus Presbytcrianism, and excludes 
me because I insist on accepting Christianity minus that addition. 
That body has accumulated a quantity of doctrines, notions, opin- 
ions, etc., which it holds above and beyond Christianity. Those 
doctrines, notions and so on, are Presbyterian-zsm,. They are not 
the Christian faith, but a pile of opinions about election, reproba- 
tion, forensic justification, effectual calling and things of that sort, 
which are the pet views of the denomination. Oa their account 
the denomination is exclusive. Just so the Baptist is exclusive; 
not on account of Christianity, but on account of immersionism. 
He insists on my being a Christian plus Baptist notions. I am 
excluded, though I be tenfold a Christian, unless I accept the 
Baptist-mi. 

The Methodist, in the same way, excludes for the sake of his 
Methodist views. I am shut out, not because I will not accept 
Christianity, but because I will not accept it plus Methodism. He, 
too, is exclusive for the sake of notions. That is to say, all these 
bodies, and a dozen like them, exist as separate bodies, not for the 
sake of their Christianity, but for the sake of those peculiar 
notions, doctrines and fancies, which make the sect what it is. 



84 EXCLUSIVENESS OF THE CHURCH, 

And, ior a long time now, they have all declared that these 
notions, doctrines and fancies are of no earthly consequence. The 
Presbyterian confesses I can be a good Christian and utterly re- 
pudiate Presbyterianism ; the Baptist, that I am not a whit the 
worse for refusing to be dipped backward ; the Methodist, that I 
am no farther from the Kingdom of God, because I reject Method- 
ism. They all confess, that is, that Christianity is something quite 
distinct from their peculiarities. They declare loudly that a man 
may be a noble Christian and have nothing to do with what they 
divide God's Church for ! 

Now, when these people are exclusive they are so from conceit, 
from whim, from selfishness. They are not so because they are 
compelled by the pitiless logic of truth. They are so because 
they prize their own small notions higher than Christian charity. 
On their own confession they exist a separate sect, iti their small 
conceited isolation, not from any essential of Christianity, but for 
some exclusive whimsies in doctrine or practice which a man may 
point blank deny, and go straight to Paradise the next moment — 
so they declare ! 

It strikes one, when it is looked at, as rather a queer thing that 
these people should charge the Church with "exclusiveness;" 
that they should take their own especial sin and lay it on her 
shoulders. They each had their birth in " exclusiveness." The 
Church was not holy enough or orthodox enough, and so the sect 
was created to exclude all but the saints. That is the historic be- 
ginning of every sect. It excludes all but itself from the King- 
dom of God. With the early Puritans, whatever was outside 
Puritanism was of Satan. The Church especially was of the evil 
one. 

The only body in the land which demands only Christianity as 
a test of membership, which does not supplement Christianity 
with some ism as an essential to fellowship, is the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church. It is mere ignorance of character which leads any 
within her to talk about her as having "peculiarities." It is pro- 
found ignorance for any to speak of her exclusiveness with blame. 
Her faith is Christianity without one sect whimsy or one lonely 
ism. She excludes only Jews, Turks and infidels. 



RELIGION LEFT BEHIND. 

THE yearly departure from our great cities of a large portion of 
-*- the population, is a social phenomenon which can be no 
longer overlooked. It has a variety of bearings upon our national 
life, which have importance to this population itself, and to others 
whom it affects. 

We propose here to consider only some of its religious bear- 
ings. Those which touch political economy and civic concerns 
we leave to others whose concerns these things more directly 
are. 

It has come to be the fact that to a large number of people in 
New York, for instance, and the same is increasingly the case 
with Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and other large cities, the city 
is only a place of business and sojourn, not in any sense a real 
home. The increase of the wealthy class has enabled many to 
have a home somewhere else. The tendency towards the posses- 
sion of a country place somewhere is a growing one. Although 
the American country house is a different affair from the English, 
and the tendency towards a country life for city people in Amer- 
ica will, from the nature of the case, be always limited. 

The great majority of the people who leave the cities in the 
summer do not go to homes. They can scarcely have home at- 
tachments to four brick walls in a block where every doorway is 
like the next, and every house is cut on the same pattern. But 
in leaving the city house they do not better themselves. They 
spend the summer in hotels or boarding houses, passing from one 
place to the other as fancy dictates, or, perhaps, they go to Eu- 
rope. The family is broken up. The wife and children are quar- 
tered upstairs in some caravansary of a hotel or boarding house. 
The husband and father busy, as the majority must be, is dining 
at restaurants in the city during the week, and Sunday alone can 
be given to the family. With the social features of the case we 
are not especially concerned, though at sight they are grave fea- 
tures and suggest serious thought. 

(85) 



86 Religion Left Behind. 

A great city deserted by large masses of its people, and those 
the most intelligent and well-to do, is not likely to be as well con- 
ducted as if these remained. The man who considers it and his 
life in it as necessary, though unpleasant evils from which he 
wishes to escape, or at best to have his family escape, is not likely 
to be deeply interested in its health, its cleanliness, or its good 
government. 

But the serious thing, passing such considerations, is that the 
summering of American people is a conspiracy against family 
life, except in the case of the very wealthiest, who have country 
seats, or when the man can give up business. To the family in 
the " summer resort" it is an idle, dressy, vain and silly life, be- 
yond measure bad for children, and worse, if possible, for their 
mothers. To the husbands and fathers working in the city it is 
wretched and full of temptations from its irregularities and its 
evenings without a home. 

The Sundays of summer in the great city present a strange 
contrast to those of the winter. There are places of public wor- 
ship closed by the dozen. The congregation is away, and the 
pastor has gone on his "vacation" to recruit his vast intellect 
after the winter's stupendous sermons. He and his family follow 
the fashion. In those that remain open the crowded aisles of the 
winter and spring have given place to empty spaces, and no per- 
spiring sexton is fretting over the problem of finding seats for the 
strangers without disturbing Mrs. Goldthread, or intruding on the 
pew of ponderous Mr. Moneybags. For the people who have to 
work for their living and cannot leave the city for the summer, 
can do it at least for a Sunday, and the boats to Coney Island, 
Long Branch, Hoboken and the like, and the cars to Central 
Park, are filled (as well as the beer garden?), with people who 
prefer absence from the city heat to a church where for some few 
Sundays they would be welcome in the absence of its owners. 

Meanwhile, where are these owners? Do they take their reli- 
gion with them, or do they leave it behind in the city? If there 
were a genuine country home to which a family could go, and 
where they had the attachments and the belongings which sur- 
round a home, the Sunday in the country would be like the Sun- 
day in the city only more abundantly. The family would throw 
itself into the interests of the churchly life at hand ; they would 
be helpers to the pastor and contributors to every good work, 



Keligion Left Behind. 87 

busy in the Sunday school and regular at public worship. But 
at present it is not so. The circumstances of the case are too 
much for consistency, circumstances let us understand it, volun- 
tarily chosen, and for which the responsibility must be borne, and 
the summers of many professed Christian people are vacations 
from religion as well as from work, and actual blanks in the re- 
ligious life. Church goers in the city are Sunday idlers in the 
country. People active in all good works in the city dawdle their 
church hours away in the country. They have in short left their 
religion behind them as a part of their city furniture. 

The temptations are very strong, as we have said, but as we 
have also said, these temptations are of their own choosing. The 
sense of responsibility is lost where almost the sense of personal 
identity is lost among the strange crowd that swarm one of our 
absurd hotels. The place chosen is chosen without the slightest 
reference to religious privileges. Church people will betake them- 
selves to a resort for the summer without a thought of asking 
whether there be a church, or a clergyman within twenty miles. 
And finding none they take no pains to help get either. The 
tired males from the city, arriving on Saturday night, prefer 
novel reading or lounging to church going on the Sunday, and 
the wife will even make herself a martyr to her sense of wifely 
duty by denying herself the happiness of going to church, that 
she may " give Fred, poor fellow, her society during the day, the 
only day in all the week he can spend with his family," just as if 
she did not know all that before she came. 

Let us not be misunderstood as if we are describing a thing 
which has no exceptions. There are exceptions, and many of 
them. There are families who are the city pastor's helpers, and 
like his right hand in all good works for months, and whom the 
country pastor finds the same to him when the summer's heat 
bring them to his care. There are Churchmen who are wardens 
and vestrymen in town and the same in the country, who are 
large givers in both places, who are doing double duty as officers 
or helpers in two perhaps needy parishes, whose pockets are as- 
saulted for Church purposes in city and country equally, and 
who take both assaults manfully, and respond nobly. We allow 
for the exceptions. And yet, w T hat we have written is true, as 
scores of country pastors in whose cures city church people so- 
journ for months know well. 



88 Religion Left Behind. 

These men will tell us that it seems many of our city people 
keep their religion and their Churchmanship for the city exclus- 
ively. They certainly appear to bring neither with them to the 
country. Their example is pernicious. They are careless of their 
public duties of worship. They are profaners of the Lord's Day. 
They close their hearts and purses equally against the demands 
of the religion they profess. Perhaps the place of their sojourn 
has a struggling parish, or is a point of missionary effort. It is 
none the better — sometimes, it is sad to think, much the worse — 
for their presence. 

This vacation from religion and its responsibilities, this abdicat- 
ing of the sense of religious duty, is one of the serious evils of 
the annual emigration of the city thousands into the country. 
They carry city fashions, city wastefulness, city frivolity- — evils 
enough— with them ; they leave the large, generous, open-handed 
religion of the city behind them. 

It is for us to call attention to this feature of our American 
summer life. Is it too much to hope that by calling attention to 
it, it may be in some degree remedied? Can our people not re- 
member their responsibilities? Can they not be made to feel they 
carry them with them summer and winter equally? If pastors 
should speak plainly and exhort earnestly on this matter before 
the annual flight leaves their churches empty, would not their 
people be the better for it, and many a country brother find the 
invasion of "the city people" into his quiet parish a help and 
not a hindrance? 



THE CHURCH AND WORKING PEOPLE. 

fipHE interest of the Church, indeed the interest of all Christian 
■*- people in " the masses," is apparently greatly on the increase. 
It is felt that " the masses " need careful looking after. And their 
habits, their tendencies, their amusements, their ways of spending 
their Sundays and things of that sort are becoming subjects of 
concern to conventions, congresses, and other gatherings of peo- 
ple who are not masses. 

One of our "General Conventions" sent a thrill of gladness 
through a number of hearts, because it passed some resolutions 
with regard to these masses. Some enthusiastic souls proclaimed 
aloud that a new era was about to dawn upon the Church and the 
country in consequence of those resolutions. 

Without going to the extent of believing that the millennium 
i3 to be brought in by resolutions, we may express our satisfaction 
that these resolutions were proposed, that there was some speak- 
ing upon them, and some thought turned to the fact that the 
Church has business with people who do not rent pews. 

As to the resolutions themselves, they are of special interest to 
us because they at least reveal a feeling in the right direction. 
When we come to analyze them, we find that beyond that revela- 
tion, there is little to encourage us. They begin with calling 
attention to the fact that there is much profanity among working- 
men. This is possibly true. There is also a great deal of pro- 
fanity among stock-brokers. We seriously question whether among 
a given number of Pennsylvania miners there is as much profanity 
as among the same number of Wall or Broad street stock specu- 
lators. We cannot be certain for the first-class. For the second, 
our opinion derived from personal hearing is that they would 
hold their own, in that respect, with any class of men in Christen- 
dom. If we are to have special missions to the profane classes, it 
will not answer to pass by the stock-exchange. 

Again, the resolutions set forth the duty of the Church to teach 



90 The Church and Working People. 

theso men that they are not to array themselves against the 
capital which gives them bread." 

Now, if the Church is to go into the business of teaching politi- 
cal economy, she must at least learn its alphabet. And that 
alphabet will tell her that capital no more "gives bread " to labor, 
than labor does to capital. A phrase of this sort betrays an utter 
misapprehension of the point at issue, and a false ground which 
will render every effort worse than useless, namely, mischievous. 

If again it be a question not of political economy but of moral 
right, the Church is quite as much bound to teach capital that it 
shall not array itself against labor, as to teach labor that it ought 
not to array itself against capital. The "strikes" of recent years 
have rudely summoned attention to the fact that we in America 
will be called to face every problem which has ever disturbed 
Europe, and that under new and peculiar conditions. One pecu- 
liar condition is that with U3 the striker is a voter. That is a 
small circumstance of which, we may be sure, mayors, governors, 
even judges, indeed all people who are made by voters, will take 
special notice. 

They also frightened people who have capital (as they well 
ought), and set them to devising means to make " labor " behave 
itself for the future. One vigorous railroad manager even pro- 
posed in the "practical" way in which railroad managers are apt 
to settle things, to call upon the United States ; in all such cases, 
to abolish laws and courts and all such red-tape arrangements, 
and to send at once a general with troops sufficient to keep all 
railroad workingmen at least to their duty at the point of the 
bayonet ! 

To call in the Church to keep rebellious "labor" in order is 
more merciful. And it is interesting to see the anxiety expressed 
on all hands, that religion should have an influence over working- 
men in order to prevent them from arraying themselves against 
capital. It is quite, in some respects, a new feature in the work- 
ing of churches and denominations in this country. 

We concede the obligation of the Church to teach workingmen 
their duty. But we beg to call attention to the fact that it is 
equally an obligation to teach those who are not workingmen 
their duty. And, moreover, we gravely doubt the wisdom, while 
we do not doubt the unscripturality, of separating in her thought 
and practical dealing the rich man and the workingman into 



The Church and Working People. 91 

special classes, as if she had a message for the one different from 
her message to the other. 

It is this unwisdom that vitiates, as far as we have seen, both 
inside and outside the Church, well-meant schemes for " reaching 
the masses." The great body of people in America are working 
people, "masses" in the religious dilettanteism which is talked on 
platforms. They have among them, quite as much intelligence, 
quite as much virtue, quite as much independence and manli- 
ness, number for number, as are to be found among those not 
called "masses." To talk with them, to propose to deal with 
them, as if they were the specially wicked, sinful or dangerous 
class, is folly, and disastrous, and mischievous, and thoroughly 
un-American folly. 

We are, therefore, always sorry to see this question of the 
"masses" brought up in any religious assembly, because we in- 
variably find it the cause of talk which may be "goody," but 
which to the independent workingmen of the country must be 
snobbish, irritating and repelling. 

The fact that the workingmen of the country are more and 
more drifting away, in our cities and manufacturing centres, from 
all religious connection, is a plain fact and a sad fact. We are 
not sorry that capital should Fake alarm at the circumstance, and 
begin to suspect that churches and clergymen may be useful at 
least as a police, useful to teach people that they ought not to 
burn up railway stations or break up " palace " cars ! For capital, 
so far, in this country has had no glimpse of its obligations, has 
had no notion that it has any, and has acted, as a rule, on the 
purely wolf theory of human life. Instead of an alliance with 
labor, it has obstinately set itself in antagonism and competition, 
and labor owes it nothing. 

We have the excuse for it that it is a new thing among us. It 
has not yet learned its duty nor its relations to life, to the country 
and the world. It will learn them in time, but it will learn them 
by some bitter experiences. 

Between these two the Church must see that she lose not her 
Christian position, even in an attempt to do what seem good 
works. 

To her the capitalist is just as much a " mass" as the day-laborer 
— the day-laborer just as little a " mass" as the millionaire. They 

but an individual soul for whom 



92 The Church and Working People. 

Christ died. She cannot deal with " masses," classes and socie- 
ties. She deals with individuals, with the single Dives who was 
lost, and the single Lazarus who was saved. All this talk about 
" masses" and " reaching" them is neither churchly nor Christian. 
It is the meanest talk of the meanest plutocracy which ever ex- 
isted — a shoddy plutocracy which has never yet learned that 
wealth carries responsibility, which displays its thousands as an 
Indian waves his scalps, in glorification of its own cunning and 
audacity ! 

There are certainly a few things which we ought all to remem- 
ber. The working people of this country are not the criminals 
especially. The long line of swindling bank presidents, of knavish 
insurance operators, of forging brokers, of dishonest stock gam- 
blers, of thieving railroad managers, of scoundrels in one place or 
another of high trust who have robbed the community, stolen the 
poor man's bread, bribed courts, bought legislatures, and corrupted 
the national life from cabinet-ministers to tide-waiters, were not 
workingmen. These are the crimes of capital against the country, 
against humanity. 

And the luxuries, the vices, the family and social corruption 
which reign in our great cities are not the sins of artisans and day- 
laborers. Capital in America looked on as a purely personal pos- 
session, without responsibility to God or man, has corrupted all 
the springs of life. There are lives that are baleful influences 
every day because the men that lead them are millionaires. A 
terrible indictment can be drawn up against capital by any man 
who chooses, and if the two are to be morally antagonized, we re- 
spectfully beg to be excused from taking the ground that labor in 
America needs special missions to Christianize it above capital, 
that John the brakeman is farther from the kingdom than the 
swindling president of the company that employs him. 

Profanity in the broker is no whit better than profanity in the 
bricklayer. The shoemaker is just as safe in going to Coney Island 
on Sunday as the merchant in going to his club. Playing cards 
for money is no worse in the beer shop than in the Union Club 
House. To be tipsy there, or at a corner grocery amounts to about 
the same thing morally. 

This assumption that sin lives in tenement houses and the moral 
virtues reside on the avenue, this quiet taking it for granted that 
well-to-do people are always virtuous, and that the Church must 



The Church and Working People. 93 

make special efforts to keep bricklayers, carpenters and black- 
smiths in order — that these last and their kind are the specially 
dangerous and sinful class — is nearly always present in the plans 
of religious people to " reach" the " masses." 

The assumption is worse than Phariseeism. It is blind igno- 
rance of life and fact and anti-Christian as well as senseless. A 
Church in earnest about her work will not imagine that Dives had 
all the virtues because he wore good clothes, sat down to good 
dinners and lived in a fine house. 



THE POWER OF DULLNESS. 

rTHEKE is a certain power and weight in dignified dullness which 
-*- the prudent man will consider. 

There is nothing more unsafe than brightness. The man who 
sees clearly and speaks clearly, the bright, bold, alert man, whose 
mind works rapidly, is a very unsafe man. The world is always 
suspicious of him. He has new ways of looking at things, new 
ways of saying things. He startles and annoys people. His rea- 
soning may be very clear; his conclusions very conclusive; his 
method bright and to the point ; but his clearness and precision 
and brilliancy of comprehension and statement, are against him. 

The general average of humanity does not see clearly, nor think 
clearly, nor express itself clearly. It is a very muddled affair gen- 
erally. If it is to be taught and influenced, it must be on its own 
ground. It has the conviction that muddle and confusion are the 
normal state of things. It is very suspicious of the man who un- 
dertakes to disentangle the confusion, and bring precision out of 
the muddle. It resents his pretence that anything can be clear 
which is not clear to itself. It pronounces him " an able man, 
perhaps a brilliant man, but an unsafe man." 

It turns with a sense of relief from him and his ways to the safe 
timidity, the decorous dullness, the dignified and solemn heaviness 
of respectable commonplace, which disturbs nobody, and against 
which not a word can be said. 

As the world is at present constituted, the man who sneers at 
grave and orotund dullness is very short-sighted. There is no 
stronger element in the moral values of State or Church than a 
judicious and stately stupidity. People always know where to 
find it. It is something a man having once learned to lean on, 
can lean on all his life. 

In the pulpit perhaps there is nothing that at times has greater 
influence. When decorous and solemn commonplace occupies 
that position, and gravely confines itself to large round platitudes, 
it is a positive relief to a man of nervous temperament. He can 

(94) 



The Power of Dullness. 95 

close his eyes and go to sleep quietly, satisfied that when he wakes 
everything will be as he left it. There i3 a sense of serene rest and 
calm, as if a man were removed from all the turmoil of the wicked 
world, when he can incline his head at a comfortable angle, and 
let the round and balanced sentences lull him to his rest. 

We entered once, awhile since, a church which shall be name- 
less. The pew backs were very high. They were well cushioned. 
The preacher stood in a thing shaped like a giant's wine-glass. 
There were seventy-five heads before him, exclusive of our own, 
all gray or bald. These seventy-five heads just appeared above 
the backs of the pews, clothed in their venerable gray crowns of 
glory, or shining in their bareness, where sermons by the hundred 
had hit and glanced off to the next pew. The venerable heads 
were calmly reposing in that sweetest of all sleeps since infancy — 
a Sunday sleep in a well-stuffed pew — all except perhaps a half 
dozen whose consciences or ledgers kept them awake. It was 
only at rare intervals that a noise, as of one in an uneasy dream, 
disturbed the solemn cadences of the preacher. 

He was preaching on the duty of reading a chapter in the Bible 
every day. It was a thoroughly safe subject, and he handled it in 
a thoroughly safe way. The sentences were ail round and well 
finished after the approved pattern, and they roiled out with a full 
and musical intonation, as if the speaker enjoyed the sound of his 
admirable voice. Evidently he was " the right man in the right 
place," a man of weight and influence, a thoroughly safe man, to 
whom those dignified gentlemen could intrust the preaching of 
the Gospel in their church, satisfied that all was well, while 
" drowsy tinklings lulled the fold." It was a touching sight to see 
the quiet confidence those world-weary men reposed in their 
chosen shepherd ; with what infantile simplicity they dropped to 
rest, as if each one said, " The doctor is preaching. It is all right. 
He will go through that manuscript in a way to command any 
man's confidence and respect. We can go to sleep like lambs 
while he guards the sheep-fold." 

But it is not in the pulpit only that the importance of grave 
dullness is exhibited. On the bench it is better than genius often, 
and the gentleman so richly endowed has a reputation already 
secured. Even at the bar it tells in very important directions. 
But when once it has mounted the bench, it is glorified. 

In politics, in legislation, the history of all countries illustrates 



96 The Powek of Dullness. 

its importance, and the advantage of its cultivation. A com- 
munity repose, like the congregation above described, in happy- 
quiet under the rule of respectable commonplace, that does to- 
day what it did yesterday, that never disturbs itself with new les- 
sons, or puzzles itself about untried problems. 

No man is more annoying in political affairs than your re- 
former, your man of genius, your bright, clear-eyed man, who 
insists on getting at the bottom of things, and knowing whys and 
wherefores. A community that consults its own interests, will 
keep him and all such out of all places of power. 

To be sure it is only fair to say that sometimes there come 
crises in social and political life which set all rules at defiance, and 
your dull man looks on with a dazed and imbecile look in his 
glassy eyes which is really tragical and pitiful. There is need of 
something more than dullness then, or things go very badly. But 
as soon as the crisis is over, dullness assumes its ancient worship, 
and clothes itself in all its primeval dignity. 

In literature the influence of dullness is not given, we are sorry 
to say, its due consideration. Readers are getting into a bad 
habit of impatience with it. They have been known to condemn 
it, and speak bitterly and sarcastically about it — to resent it 
almost as a personal injury. This is the case in general litera- 
ture, however. Religious literature has not thus cast off all re- 
gard for the past, and abandoned itself to new-fangled ways. 

The religious book, or the religious publication, being in some 
sort akin to the sermon, retains still due respect for dignified and 
solemn dullness. It is read as a duty, sometimes as a penance 
perhaps, and the reader resents any attempt to render his toil 
lighter or his penance less penitential. He wants to go in the 
old respectable and decorous path and the ponderous periods of a 
grave discussion, ponderously involved and elaborated, have a 
great weight with him. They sound very magnificent and learned? 
and at all events are thoroughly safe ; and his religious book or 
religious newspaper must first of all be safe. " Whatever is is 
right," must be their motto. The same venerable straw must be 
threshed over again and again with the same regular and grave 
beat of the wooden flail. The writer must not disturb his reader 
with any subject on which there is a difference of opinion, or 
with any view or any question later than his venerable great- 
grandfather. 



The Power of Dullness. 97 

We know religious papers, for instance, which owe their weight 
and consideration, and both are considerable, to the fact that they 
never had an opinion and never will have ; that they never ex- 
pressed themselves on any matter on which there is greater doubt 
than on the propositions that "honesty is the best policy" and 
"virtue is its own reward;" whose secret of influence is the owl- 
like gravity and highly-respectable dullness with which they repeat 
Mother Grundy's oracular utterances to an over-awed world. So, 
as we have taken the liberty to say, he is a very thoughtless man 
who underrates the high position which dullness holds in the minds 
of men, or the dangers and the failures of brightness. 

We cannot ourselves see why the pulpit should be dull, why 
religious books should be unreadable, why religious newspapers 
should be stupid. We do not see the connection between piety 
and owliness, nor understand why necessarily brightness should 
be condemned as hostile to religion. 

But though we cannot see the subtile bond of connection, we 
recognize the fact. We warn all men that are called to write ser- 
mons to shun anything like originality or power ; to avoid saying 
things in a way in which they are not said by everybody else ; to 
steer clear of all attempts at vivid, precise and clear utterance. 
These things are sure to be considered " unsafe." They may at- 
tract for a time, may have influence for the moment, but as a de- 
pendence, in the long run, there is nothing that wears like good 
heavy dullness. 

The same warning is equally necessary in the case of religious 
books and periodicals. The temptation to brightness may be very 
strong at times. It is wise to resist it with all one's might as a de- 
lusion and a snare. The thing that wears and holds its place as 
safe and influential to the last, is grave and judicious common- 
place. 

We have watched with a sad interest the working of this temp- 
tation in the case of some church newspapers. There has been, 
in some instances, a strong tendency in the direction of brightness 
and directness. We have trembled for the result. A judicious 
snubbing, however, has usually effected a cure. The ambitious 
effort has been met with the demand for a safe and prudent and 
solemnly respectable " family paper" gravely astride the fence, 
and blinking with a look of ineffable wisdom now at the crowd 
on this side, and now on the throng on that, determined to hold 
7 



98 The Power of Dullness. 

that fence at all hazards and disturb nobody by the question of 
which side is right or which wrong. 

But alas, there are now and then mistaken mortals who do not 
know how to be dull; who even esteem it a duty not to be, to 
have clear opinions and express them clearly. 

It is our plain duty to watch over them and warn them, to 
throw about them all inducements that can restrain them from a 
course so pregnant with mischief to themselves and others. 

For no matter what restless and light-minded people say, there 
is nothing safer than a certain respectable heaviness. It calms 
one's feelings and consoles a mind disturbed in a restless world. 
Eeligious newspapers especially should cultivate it assiduously. 



OBSCURE MILLIONAIRES. 

THE London Spectator once published a list of those it called 
-■■ " obscure millionaires" who had died within the previous ten 
years. The list was rather a long one. 

This list sets one considering. The age is a shopkeeping age, it 
is true. It is apt, we say, to value men according to their prop- 
erty. Great wealth gives great consideration, and yet, notwith- 
standing the exaggerated importance of money and money get- 
ting, it appears that wealth in the largest measure redeems no man 
from obscurity ; that money in itself, by its mere possession, con- 
fers no distinction which even this age values. 

Its use, and not its possession, is all that can make it a matter of 
distinction. 

In our own country even more than in Europe, wealth exagger- 
ates its own consequence. It is natural that it should, for here, 
more than there, it is a personal matter. The American million- 
aire has " made," as he says, his own millions. They represent 
his own shrewdness, industry, tact, perseverance, or " good luck." 
He is fond, it may be, of reminding us all that it is so. He is a 
"self-made man," and recurs to the time when he was a barefoot 
boy, or a penniless youth with some pride, as a proof of how 
bright a man he is in having changed by his own unaided powers 
the early poverty for the present wealth. 

He feels in his heart he has done a noble work, and that he de- 
serves the commendation of mankind for doing it. He is liable to 
disappointment, as we all know, and it is somewhat strange that, 
shrewd as he is in money matters, he is so blind in others. For 
the rest of the world is very busy, and has little time to trouble it- 
self about his success or his failure. Neither can other people see 
on exactly what grounds a man can claim its applause only for 
having taken good care of his own interests. 

The consideration given to him for his money is given only to 
his face by those who expect to get something by it. The com- 
munity would look complacently upon the matter if a sudden re- 

(99) 



100 Obscure Millionaires. 

vulsion should set him to sweeping the streets to-morrow, would 
consider Mm indeed quite as important in the last occupation as 
in that of raking his heaps higher. In other words it is the wealth 
itself that is important, if there is any importance in the case. The 
man who owns it may be very unimportant. In fact, if he is con- 
tent to be merely its owner, is sure to be so. 

The only way to create distinction with wealth is by the use. 
What a man does with what he has determines the question of his 
obscurity. The world is very just, and forgets all but its benefac- 
tors. The millionaire who uses his millions for his own benefit is 
like the office-holder who uses his office for his own benefit, or the 
man of genius who exhausts his genius for his own selfish ends, or 
indeed like any man who, endowed with a trust, uses the trust for 
his own exclusive use and behoof. 

Men possessed of other trusts are not as apt to make this mis- 
take as the men possessed of money. Genius, intellectual power, 
high spiritual gifts, we are all loud to claim are conferred for the 
good of humanity. We stand ready to condemn relentlessly the 
men who endowed with such gifts use them meanly for their own 
advantage. But great wealth, especially if a man has himself 
won it, is less apt to be considered a trust. 

The greed for it is great. It is often sought not for itself, but for 
the supposed distinction it confers. When the young man of en- 
ergy and ambition looks forward to the attainment of it as the end 
of his endeavors, he is not led by any miserly desire for money 
in itself. He has rather the nobler desire of winning distinction 
and importance by its possession. It is a means, and not an end. 
Pity he should in the years of his pursuit so often change his 
notion. 

For his first opinion is right. Wealth can confer distinction. It 
can bring honor and high consideration. It can make a man's 
memory fragrant with blessings for centuries. But to do all this 
it must be used. 

There are millionaires in our own country who will neither be 
remembered nor cared for thirty days after their costly funerals. 
Their passage from among living men will leave no void, for the 
stocks and bonds and shares which alone gave them their conse- 
quence remain. Mankind has lost nothing, misses nothing. 

There are others who will be missed in a thousand places and 
by thousands of hearts, for though the millions remain, the heart 



Obscure Millionaires. 101 

that made the millions a blessing is gone. The man in this case is 
lost to us, and he was more than his money. There are again 
some few who so dispose of their thousands that their names and 
memories are linked for years, for centuries, to the monuments of 
beneficence they leave behind them, famous the land over, not for 
their wealth, but for the good deeds their wealth was used for. The 
millionaire is nothing, his importance nothing, his consequence 
nothing. We want to know what he does with his millions before 
we care to remember his name. As a millionaire merely, he is 
like the great poet who never writes, the great orator who has 
never made a speech, the great inventor who has never invented 
anything. He had grand opportunities. He could have done so 
much with his money. He did nothing. He "died worth so 
many millions." That is all. We stand by his grave, and think 
11 what a fool he was !" Another " obscure millionaire." 



A TIME OF WORK. 

OTRONG hopes have been expressed that the Church is about 
^ entering on a career of what is called, somewhat vaguely 
and certainly confusedly, "practical work." The hope is founded 
on the peace and good will which it is assumed reign among us 
at present. The belief that they reign is founded again on the 
fact that the last General Convention seemed to do as little as 
possible and leave matters nearly as it found them. 

On the whole we are not sure that this connection of cause and 
effect is quite philosophical. 

But more peace, granting its existence in a Church, is not cer- 
tain to be fruitful in either good works or good thoughts. It de- 
pends very much on the nature of the peace. 

A Church maybe in profound peace when she is dead, or prac- 
tically so. The peace may be the peace of the coffin. 

A Church maybe at peace, too, because she has become utterly 
indifferent to truth or error. There is nothing worth contending 
for. Gospel and anti-Gospel are about the same to her. The 
Catholic Faith is all well enough, but so also is denial of the 
Catholic Faith. In fact, is there any Catholic Faith ? Is there 
any real truth and certainty in the world, and does it make much 
difference what is held or taught, so only that we have " practi- 
cal" results? Are there any doctrines, any beliefs worth contend- 
ing for, worth keeping brethren disturbed about, worth disturbing 
ourselves about? 

It is conceivable that a Church may be at peace, or what seems 
to the outward eye to be such, from indifference to all truth, from 
toleration of all error, from a latitudinarianism so wide that so 
long as a man is within her and does not disturb her he may 
teach, hold and practice what he will. Her peace may be so pro- 
found that there is not sufficient love for truth or sufficient hatred 
of falsehood within her, as that she shall disturb herself though 
the Truth she was set to guard be trampled upon in half her pul- 
pits, and scouted by half her teachers. 

(102) 



A Time of Work. 103 

Churches have been in such condition before now. The Church 
of England was never in profounder peace than when Socinian- 
ism was represented on her Episcopal Bench, and Seneca and 
Epictetus, instead of St. Paul and St. John, were the Apostles in 
some of her most dignified pulpits. 

And so much was she enamored of this peace that she had 
only scorn, hatred and opposition for any earnest soul who pro- 
posed to disturb it by preaching Christ and Him crucified ! 

So one needs to consider the kind of peace. 

If it be a peace which sinks unimportant differences, mere per- 
sonal notions and preferences in the face of a great, overwhelm- 
ing, fruitful Truth which lies below and above them all, a peace 
springing from the intense realization and passionate grasp of an 
everlasting Verity, leaving no room to consider its temporary and 
accidental coloring, then such peace is blessed and the united 
Church marches a serried host under the inspiration of this great 
creative Truth of God to new conquests daily. 

But if it be a peace coming from carelessness about truth in 
itself, from doubt whether there be any truth, from distrust as to 
the power of it and lack of faith in its fruitfulness, if the thought, 
expressed or unexpressed, be "it is of no consequence what a 
man believes or a Church. All beliefs, and, indeed, all unbeliefs, 
amount to the game thing in the end, and there is nothing in any 
of them worth a struggle" — then we may be sure the peace is 
anything but fruitful. It is a peace which needs be broken, and 
shortly, too, if that Church is to live. 

Now we do not say our Church is by any means at peace. We 
are far from taking the fact of a very pleasant Convention, full of 
amiability and good fellowship, in the enjoyment of the genial and 
generous hospitality of a delightful city, as convincing evidence of 
its existence. Among gentlemen and Churchmen there are no per- 
sonal dislikes involved in differences of opinion. It by no means 
follows that because such men treat each other courteously, even 
affectionately, that therefore they have on either side changed 
their opinions. It is only the shallowest outside view that could 
see things so. Beliefs are not things which honest men at least 
can give up for courtesy, or even friendship. It is only those who 
have none themselves that can so imagine. We believe ourselves, 
that every principle over which the Church has been contending 
for three hundred years is alive and energetic to-day. We trust 



104 A Time of Work. 

they will be alive and energetic for many years to come. The out- 
ward expressions of such principles may change their form. But 
the principles themselves are deathless and will assert themselves 
as vigorously as of old. And in this we see the hope of the 
Church, that those principles are so strong, so vital, and held go to 
be, that true men will never allow them to sink into forgetfulness, 
or yield them as indifferent in a Church alive to the whole cycle 
of God's truth. 

Granting, as it has been claimed boastfully, that the so-called 
"Evangelical Party" has ceased out of our Church, does any 
man imagine that out of it has ceased also the central truth that 
party represented, and, in ways which were by no means always 
admirable, insisted upon, namely: That Church, Sacraments, 
Priesthood, all apart, those considered or not considered — every 
soul must stand alone before its Judge and answer for itself as if it 
were the only soul in the universe with Jesus Christ, and Him 
alone its advocate, if it have any advocate at all? Does any man 
dream that a central vital truth like that can ever cease out of a 
living Church, ever fail in such a Church to find powerful and in- 
tense utterance, or fail, if it be thought, rightly or wrongly, that 
there is any danger of its being overshadowed or forgotten, to sum- 
mon to its passionate defence and restatement thousands of earn- 
est souls? 

But if we admit that there be unusual peace in the Church at 
the present, does it follow that such condition is prophetic of more 
earnest and successful work ? 

We answer yes, on one express condition, and we earnestly call 
on all earnest men to consider and understand. 

If the peace result from such intense grasp upon some underly- 
ing, overshadowing and vital truth of God, that for the time being 
all smaller truths are embraced and absorbed, as it were, into it, 
and all mere details of teaching and holding it are dwarfed in the 
passionate love for it, and for its propagation and triumph — so and 
not otherwise ! 

For no reform springs out of the ground ; no work for man has 
ever yet been done unless as the result of some truth held vital. 
The world's work, much less the Church's work, is never done on 
general principles. Some man must suffer for the people always. 
Every step onward has been won in blood and sweat. The tri- 
umphs of humanity are tracked by the dead and wounded. If 



A Time of Work. 105 

men are saved temporarily or eternally, they must have saviours, 
and those saviours can never save themselves. The price of see- 
ing others saved is that a man is himself content to perish. 

And these saviours never come unless as led and sustained by 
some overmastering conviction. Men give their lives to a cause 
because of faith in the cause. Faith is ever the measure of sacri- 
fice ; sacrifice ever the measure of success. The high tides of the 
Church's work are always the high tides of her faith. Every refor- 
mation, every era of advance, has been an era when some great 
vitalizing and impelling truth seized men and drove them pitilessly 
onward to toil, and if need were to perish. The grasp of a man 
upon such a truth is the measure of his efficiency. 

If a man work there must be some motive for his work. If a 
Church work there must be some motive for her work. That mo- 
tive is a faith in some truth. It is intense and efficient according 
to the faith ; it is idle to suppose that because a Church has ceased 
to care for doctrines she is therefore ready to go to work. Most 
of the talk which uses the word "practical" as the sum of wis- 
dom is excessively shallow. There is nothing practical that is not 
based on principle. The deeper the principle the more its prac- 
tical results. Doctrine is the basis of all duty. A Church without 
doctrine is a Church without work. 

If there be no danger of eternal death, why should a man labor 
to save men from a phantasm ? If there be salvation without 
Christ why should men spend their lives in bringing them to 
Christ ? If one " Church " is as good as another why trouble one- 
self to bring a man into any in particular ? If there be no danger 
to the souls of men in error why worry oneself to teach them 
truth ? If belief is of no consequence why teach any particular 
one ? If there is nothing wrong or harmful in Eomish doctrine 
what a waste of effort there has been in our Church for three 
centuries, and what blind, blundering, aimless lives our fathers 
lived in their stupid Protestautism ! And if there be no evil in 
belief in purgatory, in auricular confession, in prayers to angels 
and dead people, in worship of the Eucharist, and the rest, what 
a stupid business it has been from Ridley downward, and what a 
mass of trash those Articles we have been making so important! 

If the Church be a benevolent society to do people good, "prac- 
tical " men should remember it is because she is far more than a 
benevolent society, and that if she were only such she would 



106 A Time of Work. 

never have continued to this day and would disband to-morrow. 
The reason for her existence lies deeper than the benevolent 
works which they sometimes seem to imagine to be her only 
works. If she is of use in society, even to the degree of persuad- 
ing men on a " strike " not to burn railroad cars, it is because she 
has beliefs intensely held, which make her consider railroad cars 
of very small consequence. The notion that without those be- 
liefs she would have any interest in railroad cars, or care whether 
men burned them or not, is a very shallow delusion. 

Now whether there be in the present condition of our Church 
the emergence into new life and power of some partially forgotten 
or blurred truth, which, flaming and insistent, has seized upon her 
heart and conscience, with the power of a new revelation to impel 
her to new and heroic efforts for the salvation of men, is a thing 
on which we leave the reader to make up his own mind. But we 
wish to assure him that if there be no such emergence, then the 
hope of a new era of more advancing work is a dream and the 
prophecy of it a deceit. 

If it be just as well for the Chinese to be taught Komanism why 
should any man throw away his money or his time teaching them 
something else ? If it is just as good for the Indians to be made 
Methodists why should we trouble ourselves about making them 
Churchmen ? If Presbyterianism is as good as Episcopalianism 
why do we keep a band of bishops and clergy on the frontier 
establishing the last ism and worrying the Church about the 
means to do it? And if all doctrines be equally good, or equally 
indifferent, and the definition of the Protestant Episcopal Church 
be " the Church that admits all views to be equally good and all 
equally welcome from High Mass and its worship to Unitarianism 
and Universalism, so that none can find fault with the other, and 
all live together in peace," is it worth while, since all these views 
are taught and well taught by other bodies, to trouble ourselves 
about a pair of missionary boards to propagate them at home or 
abroad ? 

For to keep up a Church for its own sake — the sake of the 
mere organization — is the narrowest sectism under whatever fair 
names the thing be veiled. Moreover, a Church so kept up is not 
worth the keeping and proves itself so to all men finally. The 
Church, any Church, and the whole Church, is worth its outcome, 
worth its results, not a penny more. It exists not for its organiza- 



A Time of Work. 107 

tion, but for what grows out of its organization. There are 
churches — Apostolic Churches— dead and cumberers of the ground 
to-day, disgraceful to the name they bear, because they have 
made this mistake. 

If any one supposes that it will be sufficient motive to cause 
men to work and give and spend themselves for long, that they 
may merely bring men into one organization rather than another, 
he has studied history little and human nature less. And if he 
imagines that it will be an element of persuasion to bring men 
into the one rather than the other, because it is indifferent what 
he believes, and this "liberal" one admits all doctrines indif- 
ferently, and is devoted to " charity," he is strangely blind to an 
experience before his eyes. 

The prophecy of the Church's efficiency and power is not to be 
based, as shallow- sighted seers put it, upon indifference or good- 
natured careless toleration, but upon her clear vision and pas- 
sionate embrace of doctrine vital to the souls of men — doctrine 
which throbs into living energy in every fibre of her being. Faith 
is the measure of her power. 



A PASSED FASHION. 

fpHERE are fashions in religion as well as in other things. The 
■*■ Church is subject to the influences of tendencies; and in doc- 
trine, ritual, or practice of devotion, in style of worship, of 
preaching, or of benevolent action, the history of the Church, as 
of the world, teaches the power of temporary influences and 
shifting tastes, the power of tendencies and fashions. 

The "drawing" sermon of one year is the " dull" sermon of 
another. The important doctrine of one decade awakes no ex- 
citement in the following. The point on which the fate of the 
Church, the world and even religion itself, turned in the begin- 
ning of a century, may be, in the middle of the same century, 
considered a very unimportant point indeed. A matter held to 
be vital to the very existence of the Church at one council, may, 
at the next, be passed in silence as a thing indifferent. 

For while there is the divine element of unchangeableness in 
Christianity and in the Church, there is also (since both are in 
human hands), the human element, which is variable, as all 
things human are. 

The wise man knows this and accepts the conditions. He is, 
therefore, not disturbed — certainly not unduly excited — at any 
temporary tendencies or "fashions" (so to speak), in religion or in 
the Church. These, he knows, pass away. The truth and the 
fact abide forever. 

Some while since there were frequent complaints about the 
tendency to pass by men of experience and years in choosing 
pastors and to " extend calls" instead to younger men. 

Sixty was called the "dead line" in ministerial service. A man 
out of duty with hair frosted was supposed to have little likelihood 
of being "called" into duty again. It was complained that, 
whereas, to the physician, to the lawyer, to the banker even, gray 
hairs and long experience are actual capital, to the clergyman 
alone they are a positive drawback and even fatal objection. Par- 
ishes, it was said, preferred young men crude in thought, inex- 

(108) 



A Passed Fashion. 109 

perienced in life, shallow in council, to men of ripe wisdom, 
chastened thought and long years of service. 

There was, some years ago, to tell the truth, a prevailing rea- 
son for such assertions. Young men were the "fashion." But 
like all fashions it was a fashion sure to change. It has not lasted 
even so long as one might have expected. That it is rapidly pass- 
ing away, any one, in the way of observing the course of events, 
must have distinctly noticed. Parishes are getting into the way 
of asking about a proposed rector: "Is he a man of experience? 
How long has he been in the ministry?" And of saying, very 
decidedly, " We do not want a boy." 

Even in the matter of electing bishops it is no longer considered 
quite the highest recommendation of the new bishop's fitness, nor 
the chiefest evidence of the electors' wisdom, that "he is barely of 
the canonical age — the youngest bishop, we believe, ever elected 
in the Church." 

And there are very positive and plain reasons for this change 
of temper and change of fashion. Ascertained character has a 
value. In the lowest of life's interests it has a value. Its value 
can be summed, and is every day summed there in the measure 
of value there recognized. Experience counts. Settled steadiness, 
habitual industry, fixed habits of duty and work, count. It is very 
strange, in one point of view, that practical men, keen sighted, 
and with a true instinct toward wisdom in these lower matters, 
should have been so blind in matters infinitely higher. As 
director of a bank, a gentleman would esteem it mere folly or 
worse to vote for an inexperienced youth for president, or even 
for a responsible partnership, while, as warden or vestryman of a 
parish, the same gentleman would vote for a comparative novice 
as his rector. The explanation, of course, is that most men con- 
sider their bank accounts (as a matter of practical concern), of 
more importance than their souls! 

But there is a change. The temporary fashion is passing away, 
as it was sure to do, and gray beards appear to be coming to the 
front again. Not alone among ourselves, but in all the denomi- 
nations. 

We may indicate some of the more evident causes for the 
change. 

It has been found that an " Evangelical" parish might " call" 
an exceedingly "Evangelical" young rector, and that, in the 



110 A Passed Fashion. 

course of a few years, the young rector finding out the error of 
his ways and rapidly "advancing" on new and untrodden paths, 
might develop an intense liking for candlesticks and chasubles, 
much to the horror, and generally to the confusion and scattering 
of the staid ell parish ! 

Now it plainly i3 not a question here of the right of candle- 
slicks and the rest, nor of the rector's right to indulge in those 
luxuries. But the parish has its rights also, and when it "called" 
the Rev. Mr. Blank, a young priest of twenty-five, it certainly did 
not contem} late his blooming out, the Rev. Dr. Blank at thirty- 
five into vestments, " high ritual" and " Catholic advance." There 
is a breach of contract in some sort and the parish feels naturally 
somewhat sore. 

Or the enthusiastic young rector takes another direction. Can- 
dlesticks, vestments and such like are not beautiful in his eyes. 
He does not " advance" in their direction nor by their light. But 
he has "broadened." He has not " advanced" but spread out 
(sometimes the spreading is necessarily thin) and his ideas about 
the Atonement, Saving Faith, Everlasting Salvation and Everlast- 
ing Death are, if not somewhat nebulous, at least not exactly those 
he used to preach, and which the parish expected him to preach 
when it "called" him. So again, there is an element of dissatis- 
faction, a sort of breach of an implied contract. 

And here again it will be noted there is no question of the right 
or wrong of the rector's present views or of his past. It is simply 
a question of fairness and good understanding with the parish. He 
was not " called" on the reputation of his present views. Indeed, 
had he been supposed to hold them he certainly would not have 
been called to this parish, at least. 

"But shall he not grow? Shall a rector not change his meth- 
ods, his views, his general impressions of doctrines, if his con- 
science, and duty to his own veracity, lead him, because of some 
implied contract with a parish ?" 

We are not saying he shall not. We are only pointing out a 
fact, and a result. In a Church so largely tolerant as ours, which 
actually declines practically to try any man for any opinion, it 
must be remembered that it is not the clergy alone who have 
rights. If they have the right to change, and " advance," the laity 
have equally the right not to change and not to " advance." And 
when a parish " calls" a young rector on the reputation of hold- 



A Passed Fashion. Ill 

ing and teaching a certain form of doctrine, it certainly is justified 
in feeling dissatisfied that he begins at once to find his views a mis- 
take, and instead of teaching with authority, makes his congrega- 
tion the corpus vile on which to practice theological experiments, 
till he reaches such views as, at that time at least, he believes to be 
correct. Now, as " views," and opinions in the Church are so va- 
rious, and as the laity have just as much right to their "views" as 
the clergy, as, moreover, the " calling" to rectorships and pastor- 
ates is in the hands of the laity, it is simply natural, reasonable 
and inevitable that vestries should pass by young men whose 
"views" are not yet formed, and "call" men of settled opinions, 
fixed tendencies and ascertained character. 

Sudden surprises, even when they are pleasant surprises, are 
somewhat straining to the nerves. When they are unpleasant 
they are harrowing to the most well-balanced temperament. It is 
not wonderful, then, that the laity of the Church have got some- 
what wearied of the sudden surprises, not always pleasant, to 
which smooth-faced young rectors have treated them. On the 
whole, a man when he begins to teach people ought to know what 
he is about. He really ought not to be himself a learner. When 
he arises in a pulpit as an appointed and authorized teacher of 
truths which concern man's eternal well-being, he ought to have 
some reasonable assurance that he is certain of the truths which 
he professes to teach. 

The practical laity are coming to the conclusion that it is not 
their " mission" to be the material for the experiments of unfledged 
theologists. 

They have a weak but natural desire to have the same old Gos- 
pel preached to them in 1896 as in 1890. The result is a growing 
disposition to shun " young rectors" and even young bishops, and 
to look for men who have come to fixed conclusions, and have a 
consistent story of some sort to tell, and who are not going to put 
the minds of men to the strain of discovering which is true, the 
notions of the active-minded young rector this year, or his notions 
last. 

So, even in the ministry there is a demand again for ascertained 
character, for fixed opinion, for settled convictions. And this, not 
only in the ministry of the Church, but, as we see, in that of the 
"denominations." Then, too, people are tired of crudities, of im- 
provements, " advances" and " foremost thoughts," and are insisting 



112 A Passed Fashion. 

on the very reasonable principle that if a man set himself up 
as a public teacher, or allow himself so to be set up by others, he 
should really understand and believe what he proposes to teach. 

Parishes and congregations of all sorts are tired of " breaking" 
theological "colts." Their curvets, prancings and rearings, grace- 
ful as they may be to the eye, are hardly so effective as " the long 
pull and the strong pull" of the steady worker that knows his busi- 
ness, his harness and his road. 

We have no tears to shed for the passing out of the old fashion, 
nor for the coming in of the new. It is a part of the " advance" 
of the Church which we heartily accept. 



THE POPE AS AN INSURANCE COMPANY. 

MOBALIZING on the death of Louis Bonaparte, a Koman Cath- 
■"■*■ olic paper once said solemnly, " If history teaches anything, 
if the fate of the two Napoleons has any lesson, we learn from 
Sedan and Chiselhurst, no less than from Waterloo and St. 
Helena, that it is fatal to betray the Church of God." 

" The Church of God " is here the Papacy. We are inclined to 
think that history will find other and larger lessons in the lives of 
the two personages mentioned than may be deduced from any 
connection of theirs with the insignificant little Papal States. 

St. Helena and Chiselhurst were natural ends enough for lives 
which from first to last neither feared God, nor regarded man ; 
lives contemptible for their selfishness; lives black with the vilest 
crimes, personal and political ; lives based on purely wolfish and 
foxy principles, with no sense of responsibility, nor any feeling 
towards humanity. 

The first Bonaparte was a man of vast abilities, who used those 
abilities solely for his own aggrandizement. The last Bonaparte, 
if he had any claim to be called a Bonaparte, was a man of small 
abilities, who undertook to rule a nation with the low cunning of 
a gambler, and with a gambler's morals. Their end was just as 
natural as their beginning, and needs not to be accounted for by 
the introduction of any gentleman from Eome. As well say the 
lamented " Boss Tweed " is an instance of how fatal it is to betray 
the Church ! Or that the equally lamented Mr. Jay Gould is an 
instance of vengeance, in that he did not pay due respect to " His 
Holiness." 

When a man undertakes to conduct his life on the plan of the 
wolf or the fox, he is fighting against every law that holds in God's 
universe, and we are thankful that those laws now and then assert 
themselves so visibly before all the world, that the most thought- 
less are startled by seeing him who lived as a wolf or fox, die like 
--^ 8 (113) 



114 The Pope as an Insurance Company. 

a wolf or fox at last, whether he was called " Emperor " or " Boss," 
"Prince of Erie" or "sneak thief." 

His estimate of that good gentleman, the Bishop of Eome, has 
as little to do with the end, and just as much, as his estimate of 
the beggar at the crossing. He has waged war against human 
nature, in bishop and beggar equally, and the eternal moralities 
he has outraged, grind him down and crush him out. 

It is poor cant that echoes itself as above, a poor shallow read- 
ing of the lesson of gigantic lying lives. The man that beat at 
Waterloo, and sent the trapped wolf to St. Helena, had wonder- 
fully small regard for the Pope and his Church, and died in his 
bed at peace, while a vast nation wept, and a world echoed its 
lamentation. Surely the great duke is a good example of how a 
man prospers who does not care a sixpence for the Pope! 

The great statesman, and the great general, and the emperor 
their master, who planned, and won Sedan, and sent the feeble 
imitation of his uncle to Chiselhurst, and dictated peace at Paris, 
had calmly made up their minds to end the Papacy in its tem- 
poral power, as a European nuisance they were called to abate, 
and Sedan, and the rest, were deliberate steps in the process. No 
man dreams that Bismarck will not die with a nation's mourning, 
and be buried as men bury heroes and shepherds of the people, 
even as was his great master, William. The poor Pope is not the 
Deus ex Machina at all. The great God Himself has the rule in 
human affairs, and seems to take as small account of popes as 
Bismarck or Wellington. Indeed the list of popes who have died 
in worse plight than did poor Louis Bonaparte, who have been 
fugitives and vagabonds, teaches how little account the great God 
and His eternal verities take of popes as well as emperors, when 
the said popes insist on living inhuman and ungodly lives. 

If we are to take the conclusion that all men who came to an 
unhappy end, have so come because they did not obey the Pope, 
what shall we say to the scores of popes who have come to the 
most wretched ends themselves? 

Nay, if there be any moral lessons at all in such lives as those of 
the two Bonapartes, or those of Hildebrand and Boniface Eighth, 
we must find that lesson in a higher range of thought and feeling 
than the shallow moralizing above. 

It depends on this, that it is not safe for a French emperor or 
president, or a New York alderman, for a king or a Wall street 



The Pope as an Insurance Company. 115 

stock -gam bier, for a pope or for a congressman, to outrage the 
eternal laws that underprop human life, and live like a wolf, in a 
world where God put him to live like a man. He may get through 
as scoundrels do, and answer for this life only in another. But 
again he is likely, in certain circumstances, to get trapped or shot, 
or knocked on the head as William Nogaret served Boniface, 
while the world draws a breath of relief and thanks God. 



FIFTY MILLIONS. 

G OME time since there died in New York a gentleman in ad* 
^ vanced years, who, it was stated, left fifty million dollars 
behind him, all made by his own endeavors in a legitimate and 
honest business which he pursued in a legitimate and honest way. 

He began life, we were told, very poor. He had worked hard 
and lived carefully, had never spared himself from the first, had 
devoted all his powers to the one end, and here was the splendid 
result — he died and left behind him, to other people, fifty million 
dollars ! 

That such a circumstance should be seized upon by an enter- 
prising press to point its usual moral, was of course to be ex- 
pected. 

After that press had treated its readers to full accounts of the 
magnificent funeral, had told them all about the will, and all 
about the family and fortunes of the deceased, it was inevitable 
that it should get upon its moral hobby and preach sermons — 
especially to the young man. 

Thereupon "young men" over the country were informed that 
here was a model which they might all follow, that with industry, 
honesty and strict devotion day and night to the business, they 
too might look forward after three-score years and ten, to the 
supreme felicity of dying and leaving fifty million dollars behind 
them. The dazzling prospect ought surely to fire the heart of 
every young man of ambition in the land. The supreme felicity 
of so living and working in order that one may so die, requires 
only to be mentioned in order to be appreciated, and to set every 
clerk behind every counter in New York, and all other cities of 
our great country indeed, to amass that fifty millions to leave in 
his will ! 

It did not occur, of course, to the enterprising press, that in giv- 
ing this advice it was talking arrant nonsense. The gathering of 
fifty millions, or indeed of the thousandth part of that sum, by a 

(116) 






Fifty Millions. 117 

lifetime of the most assiduous devotion, is, by the plainest laws of 
political economy, impossible to any large number of men in any 
civilized community. Thousands may take its advice and give all 
their powers of soul and body to the business, and scarce one in 
ten will have a fraction of a fraction of such a sum to leave when 
he dies. 

And it is well it should be so. The more a country becomes 
civilized, the more impossible does it become, for even such a sin- 
gle exception as that of the gentleman we have mentioned, to ex- 
ist. In a perfect civilization, the heaping up of a colossal fortune 
by any one man will be impossible, and all study of the laws of 
civilization and political economy, and all wise legislation should 
look, and do look, to rendering it impossible. That the instances 
are rare, is evidence that we have advanced upon the road of civil- 
ization. That they do occasionally occur is evidence that we have 
a great distance yet to travel. 

The colossal fortunes existing hereditarily in Europe were made 
out of the barbarism of feudalism. The few that have been made 
in modern times — like that of the Rothschilds — was made out of 
the barbarism of war. The one the newspapers made sermons 
about was largely made out of the barbarism of war also, but also 
out of the barbaric vanities of a people gradually growing into 
civilization. Another, made in New York in one man's lifetime, 
has been made out of the needs of a nomadic people gradually 
becoming settled and civilized, who are compelled to travel and to 
send their productions long distances to a market. This state of 
things can never exist just there again. 

In fact, great wealth, like great power, can only come into one 
man's hands in a more or less uncivilized, chaotic and undefined 
condition. When a country is thoroughly settled, its resources 
known, its needs ascertained, its life becomes orderly, its business 
put into regular grooves, the accumulation of vast wealth in sin- 
gle hands, in a few years will be quite impossible. 

And the aim of all civilization, and of all wise political econ- 
omy, is to render such accumulation utterly impossible and to 
scatter it when already made. All nature works inexorably 
against the attempt to concentrate either wealth or power into the 
hands of a few. When the law is broken, in cases at all numer- 
ous, Nature takes occasionally swift and strange vengeance upon 
the transgressors. History is full of examples. 



118 Fifty Millions. 

We say the highest civilization will render such accumulation 
impossible. For the highest civilization and the wisest political 
economy in a very suggestive way strike hands with Christianity. 
They all declare that the man who devotes himself to accumula- 
tion, is against each equally. Civilization stands upon the law of 
mutual help. Sound political economy recognizes the law under 
another name. And Christianity proclaims it an eternal law. 

Indeed so certain is the law that the man who undertakes to 
accumulate (unless he do it as a mere miser), in the most selfish 
spirit, cannot quite do it without helping others. He must em- 
ploy labor and pay out wages, and so give bread to many mouths 
whether or no. Sometimes shortsighted people imagine he is 
charitable in so doing, or that accumulations in his hands are on 
this account a blessing. The truth is he is compelled by the laws 
of nature and of human life, which are the laws of God. If he 
could get his labor cheaper, he would. If he could dispense with 
it altogether, he would. He recognizes no law of obligation with 
regard to it. God has in His wisdom so ordered hfe that he is 
compelled to pay royalty to the lav/ that all men are brethren ! 

Fifty millions is an enormous sum of money. It requires a con- 
centration of thought to realize how enormous. One may do great 
good with it. Bat fifty will do still greater good. A hundred still 
greater, and ten thousand still greater. In plain English, sound 
political economy recognizes the fact nowadays that capital is like 
any other fertilizer. Spread over the field it is admirable. Piled 
in a heap it is an offence. A thousand men will do vastly greater 
good with the sum than one man. It is the business of civiliza- 
tion, its inevitable tendency, for which we cannot be too thankful, 
to prevent the making of colossal fortunes of this sort. And we 
would advise, quite contrary to the enterprising press, any young 
gentleman fired by the example of the deceased millionaire, to 
think carefully before he seriously undertakes it as the business of 
his life to accumulate fifty millions to leave behind him. 

Money is a stewardship. That is the Scripture doctrine on the 
subject. It is also the common-sense doctrine, and the law of 
experience and life. 

We have seen that in the making of money a man is compelled 
to help others that he may help himself. In the employment of 
it, unless he be the merest miser, he is likewise compelled to help 
others. Society, by its working, reduces the millionaire to the con- 



Fifty Millions. 119 

dition of a man taking care of property which is used by other 
people. He cannot eat it, or drink it, or keep it merely to look 
at. He must put it into other men's hands to use. His own profit 
out of it comes from their use of it. He is a steward only. 

And it is right. For say what we will, no man makes money. 
No man ever has made his property. He has only gathered to 
himself the results of other men's labor. This is clearly the case 
with hereditary properly. But a moment's thought will show it 
to be the case with property personally accumulated. 

One man buys at a trifling cost, a waste tract of land on Man- 
hattan Island, and with the money-making instinct and foresight, 
clings to it, till the little city becomes a metropolis, till other men 
throng in and make the hive of industry swarm over new spaces, 
till they want his land for homes, or shops, or factories, at a value 
which they have given it themselves. 

Another establishes himself among a people toiling and needy, 
but gradually growing rich by their toil. The result of their toil 
they will spend of course. He brings them luxuries and elegancies 
on which to spend it. He adds nothing to the world's wealth or 
the land's wealth. He creates nothing. He simply gathers in, 
honestly as the other didj and legitimately, the results of other 
men's toil. 

It is impossible, we are so bound together by God's ordering of 
life, for any man to get anything without the help of other men, 
and in any one man's power, learning, culture, genius, skill or 
money (which some foolishly consider the most personal gift of 
all), all other men have an undivided interest, for which the 
steward must render an account. 

But there is the question of success, a little closer to morals. Is 
it a life's success to gather fifty millions ? Let us put the sum 
high enough. Grant it to have been gathered in strict business 
honesty, by strict business application. Grant that there is no 
spot or stain upon it, no rust from widow's tear or orphan's weep- 
ing, no cause of the poor unjustly suffering, clinging to it. Grant 
all. Is it a splendid success and a noble object on which to ex- 
haust a man's life ? 

The moralists of the enterprising press seem to consider it a 
question not debatable. But is their view of life and its successes 
precisely that taken by men who live outside the atmosphere of 
shops and who do not consider peddling the one occupation for a 
human soul? 



120 Fifty Millions. 

To found a city, to open up a continent, to hew a pathway for 
human progress through the forest or dig it through the marsh, to 
conquer the brute forces of nature anywhere, one would say is a 
worthy otject. But they who have done the most noticeable work 
of this kind in the world, have not often had the success of the 
fifty millions. 

Columbus did not leave many millions in his will. Shall we 
say Columbus was a failure? Raleigh died poor and on the scaf- 
fold. Was Raleigh's life a failure? To come to modern times, 
we believe they took up in England a subscription for Living- 
stone's family. Was David's Livingstone's life no success? 

To clear away error from the lives of men, to let in light from 
above on human darkness, to deliver the human intellect and 
heart from superstition and ignorance, to create a new world out 
of a dead old, is surely a worthy life purpose. 

Luther did not leave much behind him in a money way. 
Melancthon was poor. Ridley was not rich, and besides was 
burned; and Hugh Latimer beside him. To touch greater names : 
Augustine never made a fortune ; Athanasius left no millions; St. 
Paul never did more than make his daily bread by stitching can- 
vas into tents; and on St. Peter's paper one could not have raised a 
dollar in any shop or office in Wall street — failures all, shall we say ? 

And Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington before him, and 
Alexander Hamilton — no millions left by any of them. All failed 
lives, were they not ? 

Alas for the land, when its " enterprising press" stimulates the 
young ambition with the high object of a life of successful shop- 
keeping and the dying worth fifty millions at last? 

We say nothing about religion in it all. We need not. It is not 
ours to blame the man who chooses as his highest conception of 
life and its duties the gathering of money. But certainly we shall 
not make a hero of him, nor shall we set him forth as the highest 
conception of life's success. 

We would rather remind the young men of the land that there 
are grand successes, glorious successes in life, to be ever honored, 
ever proclaimed through the ages, when the maker of the success, 
as by Wall street measurement, was an abject failure. 



SERVICES IN HOUSES. 

rpHE rubric before the service for the baptism of infants in pri. 
■*■ vate, is quite explicit upon the subject, making it the min- 
ister's duty to instruct the people against having the sacrament of 
baptism celebrated in their houses unless under great necessity. 

The rubric goes on clear grounds of reason and propriety, and 
its fitness commends itself to the mind at sight. 

Baptism i3 a sacrament, the sacrament of initiation into the 
Church, of Church membership and adoption into the fold of 
Christ. It is a public, open, corporate act, and ought to be per- 
formed, and can be performed rightly only in the church and in 
the face of the congregation. 

While the Church in her consideration for human necessities 
provides that the sacrament may be administered in private houses 
in cases of danger, she also requires that the child so baptized 
shall be afterwards publicly received into the Church. 

The procuring of the baptism of children at home is an abuse 
against which every earnest clergyman should set his face like a 
flint. 

It is a thing which has often led to grave abuses, the making of 
" Christening parties," the turning of the occasion into reckless 
gaiety, sometimes into riot and excess. 

And yet there is nothing perhaps to which a clergyman is so 
persuaded. A thousand reasons are invented, a thousand excuses 
made to persuade him to yield "in just this one instance," and 
baptize the child at home. 

The only way is to be firm and make no exceptions. 

The proper time and place for baptism is at a public service in 
church after the second lesson. It is a yielding very far to do as 
is often done and baptize children immediately before or immedi- 
ately after service, or in Sunday school ! To carry complacency 
so far as to go to people's houses and without great and dangerous 

(121) 



122 Seevices in Houses. 

need, baptize children with the public service, is almost to 
profane the Sacrament. 

If parents will have their children baptized at home, the cler- 
gyman should use only the service designed for the private house. 
He should baptize the child as in extremis. 

And in this connection let us speak of another abuse akin to 
this of baptizing children at home. 

The church is open for baptisms. It is also open for marriages 
and funerals. It is the proper place for all three, the last two 
quite as much as the other. It was built for these things quite as 
much as for anything else. Yet people will have funerals from 
their own houses in a way very awkward, clumsy and inconven- 
ient to everybody but themselves. And also they will insist on 
being married in a drawing-room and making a household frolic 
and festival of it all. 

In such cases we believe it is common for clergymen to send 
their surplices to the house and put them on for the house service. 

There are, of course, exceptions to all rules. There are rare 
cases perhaps where necessity or right feeling require a marriage 
or funeral service in a private house. We have met with very few 
such ourselves, but we are aware that we have not exhausted the 
possibilities of existence, and so stand ready to admit that such 
cases may exist more frequently than we imagine. 

When they do, the clergyman should, for the time being, make 
a church of the house and wear his surplice as in church. 

In all other cases it is our settled opinion that harm is done, 
irreverence fostered, the Church and her services vulgarized, by 
the clergyman's carrying his robing room round with him into 
buck closets and corner cupboards. 

The very fact that the good people prefer to have the services 
on their own staircases, or in their own parlors, is evidence that 
the Church has little of sacred or loving association in their minds. 

They have no right to claim that font, altar, or surplice shall be 
brought to their private rooms for their private uses. 

If they will insist on ignoring the Church in this way, propriety, 
stlt'-respect, respect for the Church and her ministrations, the 
warning about " casting pearls," should be sufficient to prevent 
the minister from vulgarizing his surplice before careless and irrev- 
erent people. 

The plain black coat is all the " vestment " proper for the 



Sekvices in Houses. 123 

secularized weddings and funerals of lazy people who will neither 
take their dead nor their brides to the church, neither use it in 
their sorrow nor in their joy. 

It may appear a small matter. But we have seen enough to 
convince us that it is quite the reverse, and that some of our 
younger clergy especially, are unintentionally doing much harm, 
by a too ready compliance in these matters with ignorance or 
laziness, and by making their surplices so common, are in danger 
of reducing them to the importance, in people's minds, of a waiter's 
apron. 

In our opinion the surplice should be kept for the church, and 
services in houses, save and except in the communion of the sick, 
should be celebrated without them. 



BITS OF THOUGHT. 

HpHERE are hoars in the life of a man when all earthly help fails 
-*- him. He is smitten down and there is no succor in himself 
or others. 

Sometimes he turns to heaven. There is no merit in his doing 
so. A man is lashed to the feet of Christ, and crouches there, not 
for love of Christ at all, but only because he has nowhere else to 
go. He would not have come had he not been driven. And he 
is only there now for what he can get, not because he especially 
loves the place or the Person. 

But even so it is well. He is at the Lord's feet at all events, 
and that is a good place to be whatever may have been his motive 
in coming. His misery and despair have done him that much 
of good — they have brought him to the feet of Christ. 

But a man may, in such failure of material help, turn to hell. 
He cries to some unseen power, to some spiritual deliverer 
stronger than any arm of flesh. And he may call on the powers 
of evil to deliver him from evil, and on Satan to save him from 
harm ! 

There are times when that seems the only way. Wrong will 
save and not right. Evil will deliver out of this distress and not 
good. Satan holds the keys of power not God. It is the old 
temptation of the wilderness over again. 

In the shame and agony of a sin the temptation is powerful to 
deliver one's self by another sin. It is that temptation that leads 
many a soul down so fast and far. 

In the blind agony of a bitter and causeless wrong the tempta- 
tion is strong to deliver one's self by returning the wrong, by over- 
coming the evil with evil again not with good. " Curse God and 
die," has come as a temptation to more than Job, in the sore 
anguish that has seemed to want all purpose and all moral mean- 
ing as well as all justice. 

(124) 



Bits of Thought. 125 

One wins only by faith. The tenure of a man's place is that he 
still believe, even against his eyes, that there is no hope save in 
good. Blessed is he whom every need drives to the feet of Christ 
— blessed even if he has been so driven only after having tried all 
other deliverers and found them liars. 



THE NEW TIME. 

TjTEW, we think, realize the vastness of the change in the condi- 
■*■ tions of American life during the last half century. We hear, 
indeed, a great deal of these changes, but in so far as we have 
seen, none of the talk goes to the root of the matter. It contents 
itself with noticing the surface changes, changes which express 
themselves in mills, railroads, shops, houses, and the outward man- 
ner of life. Generally, too, those who treat of these changes, see 
only cause of boasting and national self-glorification. The deep 
meaning, for the individual and the nation, socially, intellectually, 
and spiritually, of many of these changes, they do not see. 

As Christians, Churchmen, and thoughtful men, there are other 
line3 of thought, more profitable for ourselves, and more needed 
by the country, than the summing up of the number of miles of 
railroads built, the increase of population, the improvement of 
mill-sites, the opening of mines, or even the building of innumer- 
able Chicagos. 

One of the changes about which orators will say nothing, is the 
enormous increase of crime, ignorance, and heathenism. One of 
the problems with which they will not discuss, is the method of 
dealing with these. 

As Christian men we believe, of course, that Christianity only 
can deal with them effectually. But how ? How shall it be brought 
to bear upon them ? 

In the early simplicity of American life — a simplicity which 
continued, in essentials, until a period not very far past — each 
community might be trusted to provide for its own religious wants. 
Even the border settlements would do so with a very little help at 
the beginning. 

Wealth was pretty evenly distributed. The enormously rich 
were few. The abjectly poor were nearly as few. 

In such a condition of social life prevailing very generally over 
the country, the demand and supply theory of religion did not 
work altogether badly. Americans were educated in the idea that 

(126) 



The New Time. 127 

" the institutions of religion" are necessary to the true develop- 
ment, the safety and the permanence of society, and having, in- 
bred as it were, the other idea that every good citizen ought to do 
his share in sustaining society, owed indeed a duty to the commu- 
nity in which he lived to help it in all good works, it was inevit- 
able that churches should go with civilization. The national feel- 
ing of independence also came in to help. A man felt that he 
ought not to be a pauper for his religion more than for his bread. 
He proposed to pay his way in all respects, and took a satisfaction 
in doing his share towards supporting religion, as he did in sup- 
porting any matter of public use in his community. 

Under such influences, and in such a state of life, the Con- 
gregational idea received rapid development. It spread much 
farther than the sect which thence takes its name. Practically 
religious associations of all names took the form of the union of 
a certain number of people to provide religious institutions of a 
certain sort for themselves and their families. The right to do so 
after any fashion was guaranteed. The duty of doing so, was 
inbred in the public feeling. 

Bat meanwhile Europe has emptied some of its least fragrant 
streams upon our shores. Our cities have grown from active vil- 
lages into things that in lapse of time we trust will become real 
cities, but which are at present vast caravansaries, masses of people 
drifted or floated together, with no unity of purpose save the 
single one of getting each as much as he can of the good things 
that are going. The distinction between rich and poor is growing 
quite as marked as in any country whatever. The distinction 
between the cultured and the uncultured classes is even finding 
its expression. In the older portions of the country it is becom- 
ing a very marked distinction, indeed, and runs right athwart 
even the line of money difference in a way which foreigners could 
scarcely believe. There are millionaires, for instance, who are not 
gentlemen, who have never crossed a gentleman's threshold, and 
who know they have not, and know they never will. With all 
their money-making success, and all their expenditure, and not- 
withstanding the vulgar notoriety they sometimes win, they recog- 
nize fully that the indescribable something is wanting which alone 
can bridge the gulf that separates them from " the best people." 

While the cultivated classes have been increasing, and especially 
while the rich class has been increasing, the uncultivated, the 



128 The New Time. 

degraded, and the very poor, have been increasing still more rapidly. 
What might be called the Yeoman class in the older country 
parts, has been decreasing, and lowering in character under the 
growing feeling that labor is disgraceful. In the cities the posi- 
tion of the artisan classes, notwithstanding the increase of wages, 
has lowered relatively much farther; and meanwhile in these 
there is an enormous population, brutal, ignorant, degraded, dan- 
gerous. 

Over one large portion of the country a population absolutely 
ignorant, whose interests, religious and other, were formerly cared 
for by others, have been turned loose into the general competi- 
tions of an advanced civilization, to live on Mr. Herbert Spencer's 
law of " the survival of the fittest," with what success they may ! 

A glance at these enormous changes from the earlier simplicity, 
equality and manual toil of American life, is sufficient to show us 
that the Congregational demand and supply theory of religion 
will no longer answer. 

There are hundreds of thousands of American citizens, voters 
and officeholders (if they can be elected), who have no demand 
for religion whatever, who propose to give nothing to provide it, 
of any character good or bad, for themselves or their families, 
who indeed esteem it an imposition and denounce it as a fraud ! 
There are hundreds of thousands, voters also, who, if they supply 
themselves with religion, are far more likely to take Voodooism 
than even the most corrupt caricature of Christianity ! There are 
hundreds of thousands again who have taken to crime as a busi- 
ness and turned traitors to society as to God ! 

In fact, we are repeating the old world's story over again on a 
gigantic stage. Continental infidelity has given us its thousands, 
noisy, demonstrative and offensive here as they dared not be at 
home. Eomanism has given us its priest-ridden millions with no 
Concordat to protect them, and we have not only our unconverted 
Indian heathen, but a mass of citizens of African descent, ready 
to relapse into heathenism again unless we do our duty frankly 
and fully. 

We have pointed out more than once that as long as we go 
upon the theory that " the parish" is the beginning and end of 
our purposes, the heart and centre of Church life, we are only 
going upon the theory of supply and demand, the religious club 
theory, the stock Church theory— in other words, the Congrega- 
tional theory. 



The New Time. 129 

We have also pointed out the fact that our very name and dis- 
tinction is a protest against this theory. The diocesan idea over- 
whelms the Congregational idea. It does not merely embrace it, 
least of all does it merely provide a means to intensify it. It 
actually overwhelms it — if it be carried out. 

If indeed it be not carried out, that is another matter. But 
certainly it stands among us in dumb protest against the whole 
" religious club" notion. Here is an officer and here is an organ- 
ization bound by no club laws, not called, but sent, not chosen by 
men, but sent of God, responsible for a certain territory and for 
the people in it. It, at all events, has yet territorial limits, bound- 
aries of the field of its duty, lines marking its responsibility. The 
Congregational association — "the parish" — is well enough in its 
way, but in the America of the coming century we can no longer 
trust to the voluntary association of families to provide them- 
selves priests and bishops. The new America is something of 
which the Fathers did not dream. Filled with ignorance, vice 
and crime, with the festering foulness of huge cities, raw in civil- 
ity, old in vice, it demands a religion that does not wait to be 
asked to come, a religion that is sent. The rector is always 
"called," we know. The millions who will "call" no rector, 
minister or pastor, are rapidly increasing. They must have the 
man who is sent. And we may be thankful that the man who is 
sent — and never has waited to be " called" — is upon the ground. 

We believe that in the coming century there will be such a de- 
velopment of the work and office of the bishop in America, as 
has not been seen since Primitive days. 



ABOUT SOME POINTS IN THE PASTORAL CARE. 

fTHE Church, in her warning before the Holy Communion, in- 
•■■ structs one who cannot, by his own self-examination, applying 
the rule of God's commandments, quiet his own conscience, to 
come to the clergyman who reads the warning, or to some other 
minister of God's word for help and counsel. 

We suspect this part of the warning is very seldom heeded. We 
should be happy to think that the mass of our communicants live 
so well, and have such clear consciences that they never need help 
or counsel of this kind. But we are afraid that it is not owing to 
thorough preparation so much as to careless and hasty preparation 
that so few find any necessity for spiritual counsel. A dull con- 
science that does not know its wants is commoner than the strong, 
spotless conscience that has no wants of that kind. 

But perhaps there is more to be said than this. 

Is it always known that pastoral confidences are sacred ? Sup- 
pose a man feels the need of that sort of spiritual counsel and help, 
is he assured that when he " opens his grief" to his pastor, he has 
not also opened it to all the world ? Is the pastor's wife sure not 
to be consulted ? Will the pastor's intimate friend know nothing 
of the case ? Will it really be as if it had been poured out, this 
" grief" in the ear of God ? 

Of course the answer is at once that it ought to be, that such 
pastoral consultations as that warning contemplates are to be kept 
secret and sacred from all the world, that, in truth, the pastor him- 
self is utterly ignorant of them, except as pastor, that as friend, as 
companion, as neighbor, he knows nothing about what has passed 
in such a consultation at all. He has been consulted officially. 
He has heard, and knows officially, and only so. 

But while there is no doubt of what ought to be, are we sure 
that what ought to be always is ? Do pastors commonly leave the 
impression on their people that they are to be depended on, if con- 
sulted on matters where perhaps conscience, honor and good name 
are concerned ? 

(130) 



Some Points in Pastoral Care. 131 

Things that come to a pastor's knowledge in such official duty- 
are sacred from question in all courts of law. He knows nothing 
about them at any bar, but the bar of God, so the courts rule. Is 
he always careful to put them on the ground where law puts 
them, and is his character for reticence, calmness, and careful 
speech such that he gives men confidence who would want to 
approach him in some spiritual distress ? 

There is no more contemptible gossip than a clerical gossip, 
whether he gossip about his parishioners or his brethren in the 
ministry. There is no more wearisome bore than he extant, as 
there is no one who more recklessly destroys his own usefulness 
and pulls down with one hand the building he is erecting with 
another. 

A man wants for his pastor, in many an hour of sore sorrow, 
doubt and fear, a strong, clear, faithful, fearless man, silent and 
sure as the grave, a man of open heart, and firm judgment and 
close-shut mouth, whom he can consult, on whom he can lean, 
and from whom he can get wise, kindly, brotherly and priestly 
help, a man who has dwelt in the deeps of his own heart so long 
that he will not be frightened by the revelation of the deeps of 
another, no matter how dark. There are men staggering on their 
blind roads of doubt, in scores, because they know not where they 
can find a strong, sure, close clasped hand that can help them to 
the light. 

There is still more to be said. 

We take it for granted that pastoral work cannot be done, and 
is not done only in the pulpit. Preaching is to the mass. It 
does not individualize itself to each soul's wants. Pastoral visit- 
ing, become as it is mostly, mere " calling " on people, or even 
friendly and interested "talk" with people does not meet the 
case. 

Pastoral care is individual care. Each soul has its own special 
wants, its own needs, its own burdens, sins and doubts. The pastor 
must deal with every case on its own merits, if he deals rightly. 

We also take it for granted that pastoral work of this close per- 
sonal character is necessary and desirable, and that, in the official 
warning mentioned, that sort of work is recommended and taken 
for granted. 

If this be so, if preaching is, at best, work upon the surface of 
the mass, and if the pastor's duty goes down to personal help, 



132 Some Points in Pastoeal Cake. 

counsel and rebuke, comforting the feeble-hearted and supporting 
the weak, it follows that there is need of special training and 
preparation for that work. And if people are slow to go to a 
pastor for counsel and help and personal enlightenment, may it 
not be, among other reasons, for this, that the pastor has no spe- 
cial fitness for that sort of pastoral work ? 

In other words, do we give, in our ministerial training, any suf- 
ficient place to what is called "subjective" theology ? 

None but a novice supposes that one out of a score of the prac- 
tical questions which belong to conscience and which confuse men 
and bring them into doubt about the right, can be settled at a 
word, or by one broad rule on sight. There are two sides to them. 
There is much to be said on both and yet the conscience wants 
the case decided and is wounded because it cannot decide. 

Here comes in subjective theology, that is, doctrine applied to 
life, divine principles set to clearing questions of practical duty, 
used to bring light on doubtful questions of ethics and to decide 
in cases where the man needs guidance. 

Theology as an objective body of truth is taught, as we all know, 
from our chairs of Systematic Divinity, and how to preach it and 
present it, is taught by the Professor of the Pastoral Care, but 
where have we provision for this further conversion of theology to 
the actual use of the bewildered individual conscience? And 
how fit are our young theologians on their graduation to deal with 
a hundred questions which would come before them if the people 
used their pastors as they ought to be used, and as the Church 
means they should be used ? 

We are not advocating the study of " casuistry," into which 
subjective theology developed in Pomanism, and which, at the last, 
became a trap to catch weak consciences. But there is a truth 
underlying that as well as all other errors. In our disgust of the 
error we may have discarded also the truth. And we think it is a 
truth, that Christianity is, among its other characters, a system of 
ethics for the guidance of life, and that, as such, we are not train- 
ing men in it sufficiently to enable them to do their duty wisely 
and effectually. 

And we ask here, again, whether the fact that the pastoral rela- 
tion is so seldom confidentially used does not find another expla- 
nation in this, that the clergy come to the decision of cases of con- 
science, sore, serious, and puzzling cases, with less preparation than 



Some Points in Pastoral Care. 133 

the man has who would bring them, and with the notion generally 
that all cases of the kind can be disposed of at a word ? 

Christianity is a broad, clear, plain system enough. It announces 
its embracing principles clearly enough, but how to apply those 
principles to each special case, how to descend to particulars in the 
many-sided relations of life, and bring in the clear principle every- 
where, this is the question. And to make a man fit to answer it 
in the cases that ought to come to him as a pastor, in a living, 
working Church, which edifies and sanctifies its members, special 
study and training are required, or else illumination almost mirac- 
ulous. We have no right to expect the last. We have no right to 
expect any illumination at all, without effort after it. 



WORTH CONSIDERING. 

6 * y E m en of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too 
-*- superstitious." 

So St. Paul opened his sermon on Mars' Hill in the city of 
Athens. 

We must begin by saying that this is one of the texts which, we 
trust, will be better translated in a revised English version. We 
lose the point altogether at present. What the Apostle really said 
was this : " Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are 
very religious." 

St. Paul was a gentleman as well as an Apostle, he was speaking 
in the most cultivated city in the world, to the most cultivated 
audience. He opens his speech like a gentleman, speaking to 
gentlemen. 

But more still, St. Paul was a thoroughly sensible man, brimful 
of tact and faculty, and he does not begin his sermon with an in- 
sult, but with a compliment. He approaches his audience on the 
side where they were approachable, their reverential fear and awe 
of the gods. 

It is suggestive to all preachers, and particularly to young ones. 

We do not recommend Christianity by first slapping people in 
the face, we do not recommend the Church by first knocking peo- 
ple on the head because they are " dissenters." It is not wise to 
begin by saying — " I have all truth and you are ignorant unbe- 
lievers, just listen to me and be convinced." 

This is hardly an exaggeration of the style in which Christian 
people are often addressed in writing and speaking by zealous 
"Churchmen." Is it a wonder that people are a little impatient 
of them, their addresses, and the Church they represent? 

" It is instructive to remark " that St. Paul, on the other hand, 
in addressing a pagan audience, in a city where there were, as we 
are told, " as many gods as citizens," does not begin with an attack 
on idolatry, though there are fiery chapters enough in the prophets, 

(134) 



Worth Considering. 135 

had he wished to hurl them at the heathen, but taking the 
very abundance of their heathenism, the countless multitude of 
their statues, shrines and altars, as an evidence of their awe of the 
unseen powers, finds in that a text on which he can preach to 
them of Him who came to overthrow their idols, break their 
altars, and leave their temples open to the rains of heaven ! 

la more points of view than one that ancient sermon, with 
Athenian heathenism for its text, is worth the careful study of 
preachers and writers now. 

There may be now and then a man who can be put on the 
right road most directly by first insulting and making him angry, 
but one ought to be sure, before he tries that method, that he has 
not made a mistake in the man. 



GIVING. 

'E heard a man ask the other day, " When will this incessant 
begging for money (he meant money for Church purposes) 
cease ? It is call upon call, now for this and now for that, and I 
am sick and weary of it." 

More ask the question than those who, like our frank friend, 
put it into words. 

The answer is as easy as the question. It will never cease. It 
is a part of the law of the situation. While there remains a 
heathen on earth, an unfaithful Christian, a sick man, soul-sick 
or body-sick, an orphan child, a cripple, an outcast, a wretched 
creature anywhere with any wretchedness, the demands will still 
be made, and they will still be answered worse or better. 

When all men on earth are blessed, when the sunlight of heaven 
gilds the hills and valleys of the world, and wraps the blue seas in 
eternal calm, then may men rest from their working and their 
giving — not before. 

Till then let the demands be made, and made boldly. The 
situation is plain. God owns a man, and all he has, and is, and 
will be. Ask him to give for one of God's purposes. You only 
ask him to accept the situation, to acknowledge the facts. There 
is no call for timidity. Let the applicant do his duty. It rests 
with him to whom he applies whether he will do his. He should 
at all events be furnished with frequent and favorable oppor- 
tunities. 



(136) 



THE DRIFT. 

•THE influence of the Church is not confined to those who are 
-*- within her. 

The lump of leaven leavens what is without; all that touches 
it. The Church in this way finds her principles, her opinions, her 
methods of thought and work, silently spreading and adopted by 
others. These others adopt them, often, unconsciously, and often 
after opposing and condemning them. 

Just as the influence of Christianity in general spreads far be- 
yond those who are professedly Christians, and tells upon the 
world far and near, moulding and modifying its sentiment and 
action, so that no man can, in a Christian country, escape it; so 
that even those who oppose Christianity are influenced and edu- 
cated by the Christianity they deny; so also is it with a living 
branch of the Church Catholic in the midst of divisions and 
schisms. 

It testifies to principles which are denied. It practices meth- 
ods which are opposed. Day by day and year by year it stands 
as a witness for God's whole and rounded truth, among the 
people. 

This testimony and witness work farther than men guess. There 
are those who accept it fully and rank themselves upon its side. 
But there are vaster numbers who, remaining where they are, and 
in nominal opposition to the testimony, are yet led to modify 
their practice by it and change their opinions. 

To instance one case, the w T hole temper of " evangelical denom- 
inations" not long ago was against liturgies — almost, indeed, 
against any forms whatever in the worship of God. Many a man 
is yet preaching in the pulpits of these denominations, who has 
poured the full vial of his bitter wrath and scorn upon the very 
idea of worship by a book. Meanwhile, the Church, compara- 
tively few in numbers, went on using her venerable and solemn 
forms, sometimes moderately defending her way, sometimes not. 

(137) 



138 The Deift. 

But the defence was of the least importance in the result. The 
fact was what told. And now, to-day, no educated clergyman of 
any denomination would dream of denouncing a liturgy in the 
fashion of thirty years ago, and many are advocating the use of 
liturgies, and some have already introduced them into their wor- 
ship. 

But the influence of the Church in respect to outward things, 
although most noticeable because they are outward, is of least 
importance. 

That influence goes deeper into the whole theological teachings 
of other bodies. It modifies their whole conception of Christian- 
ity and the Christian life. 

Calvinism is dead and there is nothing more certain than that 
its death is due to the unconscious influence of the Church, teach- 
ing patiently with all her voices that Christianity is not an acci- 
dent, but a life. 

It is amusing sometimes to hear men talk against what they 
call " creeds," confessions and platforms that is, and congratulating 
themselves that they have broken through the old rigidity of their 
cast iron "system," and have outgrown the narrow sectarianism 
of their hereditary orthodoxy. They credit it to the larger intelli- 
gence of the times, to their own greater enlightenment, and some 
of them even to what is virtually a new revelation. They are in 
ignorance apparently that their old narrowness is not as old as 
Christianity, that it is indeed no part of Christianity as given at 
the beginning. More than one preacher has won the reputation 
of progress and liberality and large-mindedness, only by preach- 
ing in a confused, vague and illogical way, conceptions of truth 
which are perfectly familiar to all Churchmen. 

In liberalizing in the true sense, and, in the right sense, making 
rational the theology of many pulpits, the Church has had a quiet, 
but an immense and pervading influence. 

In toning down or up, rather, to reverence, seriousness and 
godly order, the public worship in those pulpits, her sober ways 
have had an influence no less, and no less extended. 

There is much in all this to encourage us. We are not to count 
the good we do, in the Church, merely by the extent of the actual 
spread of the Church, and the members who gather round her 
altars. We have encouragement enough in that way, but we have 
this farther, that the Church, in the old fashion, is leavening the 



The Drift. 139 

mass, that her value is not to herself alone, but to the whole 
world in which she is placed; that she moves in a sphere of 
intangible influence, which spreads far away about her, and is only 
known by its results. The extent of that sphere is often far beyond 
our guesses. 

The observance of the Church Year was at one time, one of our 
exclusive marks. We kept times and seasons and other people 
did not. It has ceased to be our peculiarity. Good Friday is 
noticed, and Good Friday sermons are preached in many pulpits 
beside ours. 

Lent is not allowed to pas i without some observances, apolo- 
gized for indeed, and elaborately explained as not being super- 
stitious. Easter Day has become quite prominent among our out- 
side brethren. If we remember rightly, we observed that Easter 
Day sermons were quite commonly reported this year. 

Naturally, however, and as we might expect, Christmas would 
be the day which would soonest meet with general recognition 
and observance. It was not an unobserved day in the homes of 
the people, at least, there was a more or less faint tradition about 
it, and its being the birth day of the Lord, and gradually it came 
to pass that it forced itself upon the notice of even the teachers of 
" our common Christianity." 

A Congregational clergyman of some note, furnished us a good 
deal of quiet amusement by an article about the day, in which he 
ingenuously confessed that somewhere in his barrel he had a very 
eloquent and elaborate sermon, about twenty years old now, prov- 
ing much to his own edification, and that of his flock, that there 
could be no such day as Christmas in the nature of things, and 
that even if there were it would be a superstition to keep it. That 
was in his vealy days. He has grown up out of all that, and 
writes now to prove that Christmas is a very good institution, and 
to express his shame and disgust that he ever thought otherwise. 

There are a great many in his condition. He is a "repre- 
sentative man," as Emerson used to say, and his old yellow 
manuscript is a representative sermon. There are hundreds of 
such lying at the bottom of barrels all about the country, which 
held up to popular odium and the derision of all wise Puritans 
those naughty " Episcopals," who kept Christmas like the Jews! 

And, by the way, it is a curious thing how, by the lapse of time, 
all weapons against the Church become as useless to their 



140 The Deift. 

possessors as that ancient sermon. They are potent rifles in the time 
of them, and seem to do wonderful execution, but we have only 
to let their owners pop away to their heart's content, sure that 
they will find out in time, that their patent gun, no matter how 
large its bore, does its execution at the breech, and not at the 
muzzle. 



ABOUT DISCIPLINE. 

rTHIS is a very deep subject, and has many ramifications. Ifc in- 
■*■ volves at last, one's whole conception of the Church of God, 
and its relation to the world. 

We desire here to indicate several difficulties connected with 
the subject, and to point out certain principles involved, and then 
for our part, leave it to others. We long since became weary of it 
with the weariness of despair. We discussed it in another place 
extendedly, we gave much thought, and all our heart to it, as a 
thing that seemed to us most vital, to the character and claims of 
a Catholic Church, and we got no response. 

At that time, we believe, the great discussion about chasubles 
and altar-crosses, " non-communicating attendance," and " the 
adoration of Christ present on our altars under the form of bread 
and wine," had just been newly imported with " the Bennett Judg- 
ment" fresh from over sea, and these " Catholic" questions left no 
room for the inquiry whether a Catholic Church is a body that has 
a conscience, and is sent into the world to preach and sustain 
God's law of Righteousness. 

There is a lull now in the " Vestment" and other such questions 
and it may be that Churchmen are prepared to ask if there be not 
other matters far more " Catholic," matters indeed which are of 
the essence of any Church which claims that name, that they may 
have allowed to lie eclipsed too long. 

It is clear that there are some who desire to see discipline in 
some degree at least. It is equally clear that there are others, and 
they are just as conscientious, who desire to have no discipline at 
all, or just as little as possible. 

The first class believe in the Holy Catholic Church. They be- 
lieve the Church of God is the Kingdom of God on earth, and is 
established on the earth, as Christ taught, to leaven the earth with 
her own principles and laws. 

(141) 



142 About Discipline. 

They believe, in consequence, that the Church in any country is 
the conscience of that country, is in it, among other things, to teach 
it the laws of righteousness, to set up the standard of morals, to 
be the test of moral differences. 

They conceive that the Church is not to take the opinions of the 
country, but the country the opinions of the Church. They be- 
lieve (hat on all moral matters the voice of the Church should be 
very plain and unhesitating, that she should never be at loss for 
her answer, that no prevalence of evil, no fashion and overwhelm- 
ing custom of evil should ever make her falter, or cloud the clear- 
ness of her moral perceptions, and that her utterance in any 
emergency should be ready. 

And they believe, and naturally, that all this cannot be without 
discipline. Among its uses to individual souls, discipline has this 
use to the community to which a Catholic Church is sent. The 
Church cannot do her duty to that community, to say nothing of 
her duty to her own members, unless she brand wrong with its 
proper brand, and mark the wrongdoer, let the world say what it 
will, with a mark unmistakable. 

The others say they believe in a Holy Catholic Church, but they 
say it in their own sense. What they really believe in is a set of 
prosperous and successful parishes with large pew rents. They 
conceive that the Church has " influence," but not authority, that 
her influence largely depends, not on her stern integrity, her un- 
bending truth to principle, but on the number of wealthy and 
intelligent people — especially wealthy — who attend her services, 
that her wise way is to conciliate and yield and be " all things to 
all men" that she may rent all her pews, that it is dangerous for 
her, indeed suicidal, to set up any standard of morality except the 
conventionally respectable one of the community, that she is to 
confine herself in a vague way to " preaching the truth," leaving 
"the truth" (which in this case is, of course, a timid scrap of the 
Truth), to work upon consciences by the general law, she washing 
her hands of all responsibility in the matter. 

Now we need scarcely say that this conception of the Church's 
business in the world about her, and we have not caricatured it, 
is not one to kindle very warmly any man's youthful or mature 
enthusiasms. 

If the Church be a body preaching with taste and with certain 
gracious and dignified forms the Gospel, and at the same time 



About Discipline. 143 

accepting the common tone of the world about her as her own, 
and drifting whither it leads her, it appears to many earnest souls 
that she is scarcely worth the trouble she gives or the houseroom 
she takes. If she be very magnificent, queenly and commanding 
in general statements and abjectly cowardly, time-serving and 
slavish, when general principles must be put to practical applica- 
tion, she seems to these, even worse than in the way, there is a 
natural question then whether she be not also a pretender. 

And certainly one must confess that if ever a people needed a 
Church to be its conscience and a -beacon light of righteousness, 
not in talk and profession, but in fact, this people needs it now. 

The daily facts show that the public conscience, the sense of 
right and wrong in the community, is thoroughly debauched. 
Things that were crimes twenty years ago, are trifling offences 
now. All sense of any morality in certain directions, is fast drift- 
ing out of the minds of men. It takes no prophet to see the end. 
The end will be according to the uniform law which has always 
worked in such cases, and has certainly never been repealed. 

If preaching general moralities, large and vague truths, were 
able to mend this, we would rejoice. But these general and vague 
teachings about " the exceeding sinfulness of sin," have been 
preached very eloquently and very continuously, and we are grow, 
ing worse. In truth, a Church that dare not practice what it 
preaches is not a very effective preacher in any place or time. 

To carry out the uses of a Catholic Church, uses to her own chil- 
dren, and uses to the outside world, those who believe in a Catho- 
lic Church, desire to see her act up to her teachings. They wish 
her not to forget all her principles when she leaves the chancel 
and the pulpit. When she denounces sin, they wish she would not 
give sin the best pew in the church. When she reads the Ten Com- 
mandments, they do not like to see her veil her face and uncover 
her head to the breach of those Commandments all the week. 

So they are anxious to see discipline restored. And they won- 
der that others are not anxious also. 

The wonder is not rational altogether. Things will never rise 
above their level, and it is not reasonable to expect men, as men 
are made, to make martyrs of themselves in any great number, 
when they can lead quiet, peaceable, and Christian lives without it- 

For if we are to have discipline, " the Rector" must discipline. 



144 About Discipline. 

And who is " the Eector ?" A clergyman who is allowed to offi- 
ciate for a certain number of people as long as they like him. 

The poor man has a wife too, and children, perhaps a half- 
dozen. It is very inconvenient to be obliged to remove. Then if 
he displease his congregation, and they work the usual machinery 
to get him removed, he is an " unsuccessful" man. The Church 
knows him as " impractical," or " crotchety," or "lacking in tact,'' 
or hears that " he did not succeed well at Smithtown," and it is 
hard lines thereafter for the poor man, everywhere. 

Now we submit it is too much to ask a man in this situation to 
offend Squire A. or drive the rich Mr. B. out of the church ; or 
make a deadly enemy of Colonel C. whose family rent three pews. 

If these estimable gentlemen choose to live, as they very likely 
do, to the V/orld, the Flesh, and the Devil, the parson must be 
content to smile upon them as supporters of the Church, above 
all, not to drive them away by lack of tact, lest the Church suffer. 

Naturally this rector and all like him, are very much opposed 
to any revival of discipline. He cannot see how discipline will 
fill his pews, how it will " support the parish "• and pay his salary. 
And as " filling the pews," "supporting the parish," and "getting 
the salary paid," are the purposes for which churches and par- 
sons exist, he thinks discipline impertinent. 

His notion is to make the church " successful," and to this end 
one must be prudent, careful to give no offence, to obtrude no 
offensive opinions, to court especially the rich and the influential, 
and to have things go on quietly. He proposes, like a wise man, 
to butt out such brains as he is blessed with, against no stone wall 
of discipline. 

In other words the question of discipline touches at once on the 
inherent viciousness of our headless and helpless Congregational- 
ism. Each man must fight his own battle alone, must sink or 
swim, " succeed " or fail for himself. And the world's measures 
of "success" are the Church's measures also at this time, sad to 
say, and a man protests against being legislated into a position 
where he may alienate some of his warmest supporters. 

That his alarm is groundless, we may believe. That really the 
thing he dreads, is the way to give the Church respect and power, 
and to magnify his office, one may have insight to see, and faith 
to believe, but we cannot expect men to be greatly higher than 
their fellows and their circumstances. 



About Discipline. 145 

It is pretty certain that while " the parish " is the ideal church 
centre, purpose and aim, and while "parishes" mean anybody 
and everybody that chooses to " sustain the Church," baptized or 
unbaptized, communicant or non-communicant, " Jew, Turk or 
Infidel," honest man or knave, discipline is in the nature of things 
impossible, and some other outlet must be found for that zeal for 
God's Kingdom, which every Churchman naturally feels. 



10 



PRAYING FOR THE WORLD'S CONVERSION. 

GOME time since, in some prayer meeting, conference, or some- 
^ thing of the sort, in a Western city, when the purpose was to 
devise ways and means to raise a few thousand dollars for some 
object, a gentleman opened the meeting by a very "fervent and 
eloquent" prayer, beseeching the Lord to " take the good work in 
hand and carry it on to success," etc. 

The prayer was followed by a characteristic speech from a gen- 
tleman who has the faculty of putting old truths in a new dress 
very skilfully and effectively. He said — " I am astonished that 
Brother Blank, who can draw his check for two or three hundred 
thousand dollars, should trouble the Lord about such a trifle. Why 
does he not take the thing in hand himself and carry it on to suc- 
cess ?" 

There is a good deal of this praying which is not prayiDg at all 
Men piously ask the Lord to undertake works by the score which 
they are too lazy or too penurious to do for themselves. Prayer 
becomes a cloak for laziness, and piety a mask for avarice. In this 
point of view, missionary meetings are often the saddest places a 
thoughtful man can sit in for an hour's meditation. He finds him- 
self often wondering in them, not that the heathen are not con- 
verted, but that there are any Christians left ! Men meet and pray, 
and exhort, and turn the whole business over into the Lord's 
hands, with an air of pious resignation, contributing a dollar or 
two, as they leave it, as their share towards the enterprise. 

There are grand promises attached to prayer in the Word of 
God. There are grand examples of effectual prayer, in which 
those promises were abundantly fulfilled. In a vague sort of way 
most Christian people believe still that prayer is sometimes heard 
and answered at the present day — prayer according to God's will 
at least. 

Now, undoubtedly it is of the base of our faith, that prayer is, in 
its nature, always the same, and in its results always the same. 
„ (146) 



Praying for the World's Conversion. 147 

For man is the same. His wants are the same, and God is always 
the same. There is no such thing as an exceptional age in this 
matter. What is the rule for one century or one generation is the 
rule for all. 

The question is not whether God is not as able and as ready 
to-day to answer prayer as He ever was. He remains unchanged. 
The question is whether we have not ceased asking Him, whether 
on some matters He is ever really and sensibly prayed to, at the 
present day, by the Church at all ! 

There was a little flurry of defence awhile since in some of our 
contemporaries of the Church press, when the Independent, suo 
more, asserted we believe that only when using the Lord's Prayer 
does the Episcopal Church pray for the world's conversion ! 

Our brethren at once opened their Prayer Books and over- 
whelmed the Independent with quotation after quotation, in evi- 
dence that the Church, not on one occasion, but all through her 
services, prays for the world's conversion, that, in fact, with the 
true instinct of a Catholic Church, she has so constructed her lit- 
urgy and formularies, that she habitually prays for that object, 
that she cannot have a single service without doing it. As indeed 
how can she forget her mission and her commission ? 

As far as words went they completely demolished the rash and 
flippant assertion. 

And nevertheless it is still in our opinion an assertion which, in 
a deeper sense, did not express the bitterness or fullness of the 
fault. We may say the Church never prays for the conversion of 
the world and challenge the contradiction of the statement. But 
while we say that truly of the Church, we say it just as truly of 
every sect and denomination in Christendom. 

The result proves the assertion true. If the Church prayed for 
the world's conversion, the world would be converted. The world 
is not converted and gives no promise of being converted very 
speedily and therefore the Church does not pray for it! 

We will not take words here for an answer. No amount of 
quotations from the services and the collects will meet the state- 
ment. We say the utterance of words is not praying. The utter- 
ance of them all day and every day is not praying. That we 
utter words enough on the subject nobody will dispute, except, as 
in the case mentioned, one who knows nothing about the matter. 
But is it not a case where we transfer, in set phrases, to the Lord 



148 Praying for the World's Conversion. 

a piece of work which we are too lazy and too worldly to do our- 
selves ? 

We are living in an atmosphere which rather blinds us to cer- 
tain old prime truths. But how must it look to the angels to see 
a gentleman earnestly praying for the conversion of the heathen 
who spends yearly on himself what would support fifty mission- 
aries ? 

We are not arguing here, at this time, be it noticed, against his 
right so to do if he see fit. We pass that by. We only ask 
whether he can call his petition a prayer? 

For a man prays for something he wants. He asks it because 
he needs it, because he will take every means possible to supply 
his need ; he therefore goes to the Lord with his one need, and 
asks the Lord to pity him in his distress, and help him in his 
bitter extremity. No man has the right to call on God to help 
him if he is not helping himself. When God has put into his 
hands the means for supplying his need and a man will not use 
the means, his impertinent calling upon the Lord, in that case, 
may be what you please, but certainly it is not praying. 

And this precisely is the case with the Church at this day in the 
matter of the world's conversion. She is in no dire extremity at 
all. She is in no position where she can expect an answer to her 
prayer. She is merely repeating by rote words which she does 
not feel. She is not praying in any true sense of the term. 

The means for the world's conversion are, to-day, in the power 
of the Church. She can do the work if she will. The facilities are 
ample. Why shirk it under the pretence of piety ? Why transfer 
her responsibility to the Lord ? We are, certainly, at this day 
prepared to confess that if the world is converted to Christ, it must 
be done by human and ordinary means. It is the business of the 
Church to do it. She was sent for that, and that is the meaning 
of her being here. 

Is the refusal to do her work and the asking the Lord in some 
extraordinary way to do it for her, is that, no matter how frequent 
and how often the asking, is that praying? 

The truth is, the Lord has answered these prayers for the world's 
conversion already. He answered them several centuries ago, 
fourteen at the least. He put the world's wealth and the world's 
knowledge and the world's power into the hands of Christian men, 
that with those means they might do the work. He is not unrea- 



Praying for the World's Conversion. 149 

sonable. He asks no man to labor without tools. He does not 
ask the Church to reap without a sickle. 

What remains? One would suppose that the next thing was to 
use the tools, was to put in the sickle, was to employ the wealth, 
the knowledge, and the power for the purpose God gave it. 

Bat this is not the way it strikes us at all ! Our notion is to do 
nothing, and to keep on asking the Lord, as if He had done noth- 
ing either ! 

If a Christian man has this year (it is drawing fast to its close 
now) received one thousand dollars, he has, at least, one hundred 
dollars' worth of means for the world's conversion — a tithe. 

If he has gained ten thousand, one of the ten belongs to God's 
fund for the world's conversion. If he has received fifty thousand, 
then he has been sent five thousand to invest in the same fund. 
God has answered prayers for the world's conversion by sending 
the means for it abundantly to His people. 

Now, our business is to invest at once this one hundred or thou- 
sand, or five thousand, as the case may be, in the enterprise, and 
ask the Lord to bless it. That is the practical and sensible way of 
acting. 

But it is not the usual way. The usual way is to forget that we 
have any funds of the sort on hand, and when the Lord has 
answered our prayers to keep on crying to Him still as if He had 
never heard us. The usual way is to put a dollar on the plate and 
then pray that the Lord will convert the world, while meanwhile 
we embezzle the other ninety-nine, or nine hundred and ninety- 
nine, as the case may be, which He has sent for the purpose. 

We submit that the business is a mean and dishonest one, and 
that when it comes to unfairness, men are unfair and dishonest to 
no one as they are to their God. To this day they lay the heathen- 
ism of the world at His door, when they have in their hands, and 
have had for centuries, using them on their own lusts, the means 
He provided for the entire destruction of heathenism out of His 
redeemed world ; and, worse and worse, they think it very pious to 
make the charge. 

Why does the Church ask the Lord to do a piece of work 
which she has ample means of doing whenever she will? Why 
does Brother Blank, who can draw his check for two hundred 
thousand dollars, beg the Lord so earnestly for five hundred for 
some missionary or missionary object ? Why does not Brother 



150 Praying for the World's Conversion. 

B. step up himself? Was there no meaning in the old curse, ex- 
cept its narrow Jewish meaning, "Curse ye, Meroz, saith the 
angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, because 
they came not up to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord 
against the mighty?" Has it not rather a depth of meaning for 
all time, a revelation of the relation between God and man, for- 
gotten too often, and now altogether lost, a revelation proclaimed 
clearly in the new Covenant, as faintly hinted in the old — that 
men are " fellow workers with God," and that, in the mysteries of 
the Kingdom of Grace, God has been pleased to make Himself 
need man's help ? Is it not startling enough that we stand crying 
oift God to convert the world and suppose our duty done, while 
meanwhile we have utterly forgotten that God is pleading with us 
to convert the world ? While we refuse His prayer can we expect 
Him to answer ours? 

Words! words! One wearies and sickens of words! Words are 
no prayers. The most pious wording may be insolent, irrational, 
impious. 

Whenever the Church turns to her work, whenever she prays 
with her hands and her purse as well as with her mouth, when- 
ever she sets heart and soul, hands and head about the work — 
which is the only excuse for her existence — she may pray then 
with the faith with which men prayed of old and be answered as 
they were. For in the tug and strain of determined effort, work- 
ing, giving, sacrificing to the last limit of her power, she can call 
on God for anything. When, so toiling as for life, the hour of her 
utter extremity has come, when she has done all she can, when 
all Christian force and wisdom and valor and zeal are at the 
stretch and strain of the final tug— God will crown the effort, we 
may be sure, if the heavens must shake in His descending power. 

The condition precedent to the answer of any prayer is that the 
suppliant do his utmost. It is the condition for the man and the 
condition for the Church. 

The world would become the Lord's to-morrow if that condition 
were complied with. 

It is not rash to say it never will be until that condition exists. 



CHURCH AND SECTS AGAIN. 

WE have spoken of the various bodies that surround the Ameri- 
'* can Church. We have not carried our view abroad to the 
bodies which do not surround her. The duty of a Church, like 
the duty of a mars, is that which lies nearest. 

The American Church, to those of us who accept her as a 
Catholic Church, as the Catholic Church of this country, is respon- 
sible for this people among whom she is placed as she is for none 
others. Her main responsibility is for the men of these United 
States. They are her special charge. No matter what they call 
themselves. No matter into what sects or parties they are divided ; 
no matter whether they recognize her authority or scoff at it; no 
matter whether they hear or refuse to hear her message, she is 
responsible for them, and must answer for them. 

We do not think, then, that to us the question of unity with the 
Eastern Church or unity with any branch of the Western Church 
is the pressing question in the matter of Christian unity. Our 
first duty as a Church lies in our own country and among our own 
people. When we show our power and wisdom in laboring for 
unity among cur own divided people we will be prepared, and 
not before, to do something effective in healing the larger divisions 
of Christendom. 

To gather into one the scattered thousands about us who bear 
the Church name, to remove the narrowness and phariseeism 
and self- conceit which is dividing brethren, to heal the foolish and 
absurd divisions which are disgracing the Christian name, which 
are paralyzing Christian effort, and bringing the religion of Christ 
into contempt before a scoffing world — to do that, in this country 
is the first duty, the plain mission of the American Church. 

If we are here for anything we are here for that. If the Church 
has any work before her that is the work. If there be any mean- 
ing in her character and position as a Catholic and Primitive 

(151) 



152 Church and Sects Again. 

Church that is the work she is here to do, is the work which, 
under God, she only can do. 

She bears witness to the worth of unity. She testifies to the per- 
petual obligation on Christians to be one. She lifts her voice 
against the sectarianism that sets up its fancies as the law of God. 
She protests against narrowing the Covenant, against interposing 
human systems between man and God. She does all this in every 
point of her character in every act of her life. 

Have we understood this? Has the real nature of the Church, 
in this character, been understood and accepted by her members? 
Has not the " low" Churchman considered her as a sect — the most 
respectable and exclusive and neatest sect going, but still a sect 
v/hich he loves and prefers, because of some peculiarities, which 
sect is to teach just what all other "Evangelical" and exclusive lit- 
tle pharisaic sects, only in her own pet sect ways which are delight- 
ful and pleasant to him ? And has not the " high" Churchman 
practically considered her about the same? An exclusive body, a 
Church indeed, the Church, as he is very fond of believing, but still 
the Church which is to stand here, holding her own, and loftily 
washing her hands of ail these unhappy sectarianisms and of all 
responsibility for their divisions ? Has he not made a sectarian 
pharisaic and conceited little Church of her, quite as hateful, in 
truth, as any sect whatever? 

Must we not sadly confess that this has been the way on both 
sides hitherto and need we wonder that the Church has been taken 
by those outside to be what those inside have represented her, and 
that the common opinion about the Protestant Episcopal Church 
is that she is the meanest and most arrogant and conceited of all 
sects ? 

Need we wonder that the absurd caricature of the Church drawn 
by the " low and slow," and colored by the " high and dry," in 
their old party contests, has been accepted by strangers as a gen- 
uine likeness ? 

But we may be thankful, at last, that the time has come when 
the likeness is understood and recognized as a caricature, inside 
at least. The mass of Churchmen have come to recognize the 
Church as neither a "high Church "sect nor a "low Church" 
sect. They have come to see that her business here is to bear 
witness for Apostolic Faith and Order and the forgotten truth of 
the Unity of Christianity. 



Chuech and Sects Again. 153 

And this gives us sight of the position in which we stand toward 
our brethren outside, as we set it forth in our last number, and 
sight also of the proper method with which we should be ready to 
deal with them. 

There has been much writing about the " distinctive doctrines " 
of the various Christian bodies. And as a fact each does bear 
witness to some doctrine which the others have either ignored or 
forgotten. Perhaps, in this, one can see the uses which, in the 
order of Divine Providence, that brings good out of evil, even 
sectarianism supplies. 

That these doctrines, not exaggerated into sect badges but held 
in their true relations, and subordinations, are all held in the 
Church is a thing which all educated Churchmen understand. 

In that respect the Church has no " distinctive doctrine." Her 
distinction is that she holds and teaches the whole circle of Christian 
truth. 

Certainly the Apostolic Succession is not her " distinctive doc- 
trine," inasmuch as almost every denomination, and noticeably all 
the Presbyterian sects and all the Methodist are practically bound 
by and acting on the doctrine quite as much as ourselves. 

But if we were to select our " distinctive doctrine" — the peculiar 
one which it is the office and mission of the Church in America 
to teach and witness for, it is the doctrine of Christian unity — that 
there is "One Fold and One Shepherd" — that to be one is the ever- 
lasting bounden obligation on Christian men. 

From this we say ought to be inferred the proper mode of deal- 
ing with sects on the part of the Church. 

There are certain things of doctrine and essential organization 
and certain things of discipline and merely temporary discipline, 
too, in the Church Catholic. 

The first are absolutely sacred and unchangeable forever. They 
are the ark of the Covenant. On them no rash hand may be 
laid at any time or under any circumstances. The Church did 
not create them. She only received them in trust and must pass 
them down intact as they came to her. 

But the matters of discipline are in her own hands, absolutely 
so from day to day. She has her own wisdom, under the guid- 
ance of the abiding Spirit, to direct her in these and in their 
changes. She can alter, omit, suspend as may seem best adapted 



154 Chuech and Sects' Again. 

to prosper her in her work and enable her to fulfil the responsi- 
bilities of her time. 

And this range of matters of mere discipline is very wide, 
wider a great deal than unthinking people fancy. In fact, the 
tendency generally is to confound essentials and matters of dis- 
cipline together, to make the last as important as the first, to con- 
tend about things which the Church absolutely controls and make 
divisions and quarrels about these when there is substantial agree- 
ment on the essentials. 

But if the Church proposes to deal with the sectarianism that is 
about her, and persuade it to return to the bosom of primitive 
unity, she must not commit this mistake. She must get a clear 
comprehension of the broad difference between the essential things 
of the divine deposit of the faith, and the humanly devised means 
to guard and propagate that faith. On the first there can be no 
compromise. If divisions rise, based on a denial of Catholic doc- 
trine, there can be no healing till the denials are dropped. 

But, as we have seen, the divisions which exist among " the 
Evangelical" bodies so called, at least, and which separate them 
from the Church and from each other, are not on denials of the 
Catholic doctrine at all. And while this makes the divisions them- 
selves look more unreasonable and wicked, it is, at the same time, 
a ground of hope and comfort. While sectarianism organizes it- 
self, as it has, on trifles, it undoubtedly gives an uglier and more 
senseless look to sectarianism, but it still gives greater ground of 
hope to those who undertake to remove sectarianism. If there 
were heretical and bitter denials of essential Christian verities to 
contend against, the work would look vastly more difficult and 
hopeless. 

But there are not. Our American sects are organized, as a rule, 
on trifles, on mere matters of personal preference, on some mere 
detail of discipline which is elevated to the rank of an essential, or 
on some mere temporary issue which died out long ago, and only 
left the habit of sectarianism to sustain the sect. 

The Church, to deal with this, must free herself from any possi- 
bility of confirming sectarian error. She must learn carefully to 
draw the line between what belongs to the eternal verities and 
what belongs to the details of human arrangement which, in every 
period of history, is entirely in the Church's own hands. She must 
learn that, on these last neither Church nor sect has any business 



Chuuch and Sects Again. 155 

to create divisions or continue them, that if divisions can be healed 
or removed by any sacrifice of these or change of these then the 
change or sacrifice should be made. 

Now here lies one line of Church education which we greatly 
need. Undoubtedly from the sectarian atmosphere about us we 
have many of us become infected, and are laying too much stress 
on the husks, on the human surroundings, on matters which are in 
our own hands, and some of which are of our own making. 

We must all get over this. There is need of sight, that sees 
things as things are, among us all. There is need of training in 
discrimination, that we learn what are important and what indif- 
ferent, that we may put our protests and resistances on a basis that 
will stand. 

And because to many that sight has come, is the reason and 
the real reason, though they may not see it, why our " Evangelical " 
friends have become so small a minority and why they are daily 
becoming smaller. This also is the reason why they are utterly, 
powerless in doing any work with regard to their sectarian brethren 
outside. 

They "love the Church," they are " attached to her sober ways," 
they are very earnest in professing their "affection" for every- 
thing about her which is merely human. She is the Church of their 
" choice " and " preference." 

That is to say, they prize the little points of outward dress and 
manner in which she differs from other bodies about her, and are 
willing to keep up the division for the sake of those, to us, utterly 
indifferent points. They belong to her on the most purely sec- 
tarian grounds, and defend her on purely schismatic principles. 

This position of theirs is very well understood outside, and it is 
not a position which commends them for consistency or common 
sense to the members of other bodies. A man who will divide 
God's Church for a few yards of linen, in the shape of a surplice 
or a few yards of black silk in the shape of a gown, is about as far 
gone a specimen of the unadulterated sectarian as we know. A 
man who will even break up the unity of the Christian fold, and 
rend the robe of Christ for the sake of reading his prayers, is only 
a little more respectable schismatic than he who will do it for the 
sake of saying them memoriter without a book. 

These things are matters of pure indifference in the hands of 
the living Church, bound, of course, upon her members when she 



156 Church and Sects Again. 

has so established them, but, in her own power to modify and dis- 
pose of as she sees fit. 

We have defended these peculiarities when they needed de- 
fence. But it was only a defence of outposts after all. We must 
come to appreciate things at their value. If anything of mere 
discipline, mere form or ceremony is keeping out of Christian 
unity any large number of Christian people, unreasonable and 
prejudiced and narrow as their objections may be, the Church is 
bound in her wisdom to look at their objections and seriously to 
consider whether she may not relax any point of observance or 
modify any given demand of ceremonial. 

We do not know what might be necessary nor how far. But 
we do say that the Church needs to educate her children up to the 
point of distinguishing between essentials and non-essentials, and 
of understanding that she does not stand on the non-essentials, 
that she is not a sect, distinguished from other sects by the use of 
a Prayer Book and a surplice. 



DO WE NEED IT? 

TI7E desire to say a few words to our readers, clerical and lay, 
' ' which have been in our mind to say for long, and we ask them 
to take them only as suggestive, and as introducing a subject which 
they are to think out each for himself. 

It is everyway becoming a more serious and pressing matter to 
discover how the Gospel and its institutions are to be brought to 
large and multiplying classes of people in our own country. 

Every day the number of those who are entire strangers to reli- 
gious worship and influences is increasing, and every day is 
increasing the still vaster number who are indifferent. 

Absolutely the number of those who attend upon, and support, 
the ordinances of religion is, to be sure, also increasing. Relatively 
to the growing mass of the indifferent it is not increasing. 

We were slow to understand this at the first in this country. 
But it has been gradually forced upon us that in our own country, 
as in all others, there is a vast proportion of the population who 
will take no pains, and give no cost to provide religious privileges 
for themselves, and for whom if such privileges are to exist at all, 
they must be provided by others. 

Not only is there the large class among us now who cannot 
make such provision, but there is the much larger class of those 
who will not, or who do not care. 

Our theory that men should provide religious advantages for 
themselves at their own expense, which might have answered in 
the earlier days, when life was simple, and there were few rich and 
none helplessly poor, has broken down completely in the face of 
present facts. 

There are thousands of people in New York, Philadelphia, Bos- 
ton, and other of our large cities to whom the Gospel must be 
brought and given, who must have churches provided for them 
and clergy to minister to them, at an expense not their own, and 
this class will always exist. 

(157) 



158 Do We Need It? 

If these people are to have the ordinances and influences of 
religion at all, they must come to them by the provision of other 
people. 

We were totally unprepared for this state of things. Our con- 
duct in the face of it has been rather astonishing, we must confess. 
Having built a church, in a good neighborhood, and finding in the 
changes of the city's growth, that the rich people have removed, 
and that none but people who cannot pay large pew rents have 
come into its neighborhood, we have solved the problem by selling 
the church and going off with the money to some neighborhood 
where the people are rich, or at least comfortable, thus verifying 
the Gospel " to him that hath shall be given" in an entirely new 
style, and leaving the " down town" folk to take care of themselves 
without any Gospel at all ! 

Gradually it is dawning on us that this sort of thing will not 
answer. It will not do to leave masses of untouched heathenism, 
about our homes, while we anxiously carry the Gospel to the 
Chinaman or the Negro. 

These people must have the Gospel given them. As a matter of 
fact, people have never been too eager to obtain it for themselves, 
and human nature is here what it is everywhere. 

There are places in scores, occupied by our churches to-day, in 
which, if we depend on the American theory of supply and de- 
mand, no public worship will be sustained twenty-five years hence, 
and meanwhile there will be more people about the Church than 
there are now. 

What is to be done about it? We are all clear that the idea 
that people will provide religiously for themselves must be given 
up. They clearly do not. Others must do it for them. How ? 
" By Free Churches," one answers. " By Mission Chapels," says 
another. But meanwhile how shall we support the Free Churches 
and the Mission Chapels ? 

It has seemed strange to us that the very plain and practical 
answer has not been given. Namely : A Sustentation Fund. 

The Irish Church was robbed of her Endowments and her State 
aid. It was clear to everybody that one result of that robbery 
would be that many a parish would cease to be served, and many 
a church would be closed. To avoid this, a Sustentation Fund 
was begun — the free gift of Churchmen — the capital to be invested 
and the interest to be used for the support of the Church in places 
where Churchmen are few or poor. 



Do We Need It? 159 

In Canada the same thing is done. A general endowment for 
the whole Church — a Sustentation Fund — has been in process of 
collection there also. 

It has never occurred to us, in the United States, to make any 
effort to endow the church. We have gone on the theory that 
people will always provide for religion, and when we find the 
thing is not true, we have only to allow them to go unprovided. 
Well enough, if we could only wash our hands of responsibility ! 

We complain of the Congregationalism in the Church, of the 
cold loneliness and exclusiveness of our parish system, of the fact 
that every man is left to do his work by himself, and that we have 
no common and united interest. 

But what else have we provided for? The parish clergyman 
has nothing beyond his parish. The people composing it, and 
they only, sustain him in his ministrations. If they fail him there 
is nothing else to look to. If they remove he can do nothing but 
follow them. He is entirely dependent on them. The Church 
beyond that boundary has nothing for him. If he is sick or 
broken down she has not a dollar to give him nor a roof to shelter 
him. If he is old and worn out in her service, she has not even 
a charitable asylum to which he may retire to die. The Church, 
as a whole, as a body, ignores, on her present system, the clergy- 
man entirely. She turns him out to work his work by himself, 
and get what he can for doing it. If he succeed, well. If he fail, 
on his own head be it. 

And then we meet and complain of our Congregationalism and 
our parochial isolation ! And we wisely propose, some of us, by 
"the See System," or "the Cathedral System," or some other 
"system," to remedy this isolation which is not the disease, but 
only one, and that by no means the worst, symptom. 

Just as long, certainly, as we go on the theory that those who 
pay for the Gospel are those only who are entitled to the Gospel, 
this isolation will continue rnaugre all the "systems" in the uni- 
verse. Whilst the clergyman looks to the living local congrega- 
tion and to that only, to sustain him in his work, while his 
usefulness, his comfort, his very means of existence, depend on 
his acceptability to them and his position among them, it is out 
of the question that he shall not confine his interest and his 
anxiety to them and be very jealous of anything which may 
weaken his position among them. 



160 Do We Need It? 

It is not in human nature that he should be eager to form a 
new parish out of his own flock and anxious to have the forces of 
his own congregation used for the building up of others. 

We are living from hand to mouth, and we have only the nat- 
ural results of such living. We have no security that in any of 
the churches which we consecrate so solemnly, divine service will 
be sustained beyond the present generation. The paying congre- 
gation may leave in ten years, and the parson must go with them 
and take the proceeds of the church sale along also. 

We have acknowledged the necessity of endowing the Episco- 
pate. Every diocese looks to do it some time. But surely it can- 
not be half so important to endow one office in the church as to 
endow the Church herself. And if we confess the necessity of 
endowing one office we have admitted the principle. It is good 
for nothing or it is good all through. 

The conditions of life in our country are in rapid change. The 
loose congregational principle of supply and demand, that men 
are to provide for the ministrations of religion, or to do without 
them as they see fit, will serve our turn no longer. We must 
provide for a changed world. And one provision for that is to 
take steps to make the ministrations of the Gospel a permanent 
thing, knowing surely that where those ministrations are least 
asked for, they are most demanded. 

That Trinity parish, in New York, happened to be endowed, is 
the reason now, and the only reason, why the whole teeming lower 
wards of that city are not left without a church bell or spire. 

In each diocese in the church we need at once to begin the 
formation of a permanent Church Endowment. Not merely the 
creation of a Missionary Fund, but the creation of a fund for all 
purposes of Church growth as may be needed. 

The thing should be delayed no longer. We have been blind 
to it too long already. It should be talked about and discussed 
and explained and its necessity pointed out and an earnest effort 
made at least to begin it. Once begun it will grow. 

We need to get broader ideas than any the parish, merely, sup- 
plies. We need that the Church, as a whole, stand forward as a 
power in the community, as a body which has more functions 
than merely to meet two days a year in convention and talk. It 
must make its appearance as a body that can rfo,and in this coun- 
try at present, as in all countries, a body that can do, is a body 
that has something to do with. 



Do We Need It? 161 

The influence of a General Church Endowment on the subject 
of the increase of the ministry needs only to be indicated. 

A man gives his life to the Church. He ought to be sure of 
his bread at least. As a matter of fact he gives it and must, now, 
to a congregation. But if his field be such that his congrega- 
tion becomes fewer or poorer (which is by no means a rare case 
in many a half-dead village East and West), he must either leave 
his flock or be content to know that, as he grows older, he is every 
day sinking more and more into discouragement and poverty. 
He has no security, no permanence. His life promises to be more 
or less adrift. He is exposed to popular caprice and the chances 
of men's whims. After years of service he may find himself 
adrift and unable to find work where also he can find bread. 

It is out of the question that these things should not be consid- 
ered by many men looking into life. They are considered and 
ought to be considered. It is only the part of common prudence 
and decent common sense to take them into account. Parents 
should consider them for their sons, and sons should consider 
them for themselves. 

And they are considered with results and such results as we all 
see and are grieved over. 

It is seen that the only career the Church offers — and how nar- 
row is our measure of work since that is so! — is that of the parish 
or rather congregational pastor. The qualities which win success 
and produce results in that work are all we have use for. Learn- 
ing like Pearson's, eloquence like Taylor's, logical power like Bar- 
row's or McGee"s — philosophic thought like CudwortKs, we have 
no place for unless with them are joined the qualities personal 
and social, which go to make the man " acceptable" to the ordi- 
nary mass of a congregation. With one of them or all of them 
a man may starve among us unless he has "the tact to sustain 
himself in a parish !" Alas! when one thinks of it, how many of 
those whose names glorify the history of the Church, have been 
too grandly simple to possess just that " tact," that shrewdness 
and somewhat worldly prudence, which the modern congregation 
requires for its successful administration ! 

And this narrowness of career shuts out many a one from the 
ministry, as it is shutting out and suppressing learning for learn- 
ing's own sake. 

"But what remedy in an endowment?" It is clear enough, it 
11 



162 Do We Need It? 

seems to us — the remedy which shall lift the clergyman out of the 
narrowness of mere congregational service and broaden his life 
and thought by the sense of independence in belonging to a great 
body which will sustain him, and has the power to sustain him, in 
some modest but firm degree, so only that he devote himself, in 
any useful work to its service and which thus offers him the hope 
of a work for which he is best fitted, instead of his being com- 
pelled to do one only for which he may be ill fitted or else stand 
idle. For surely in God's "harvest field, if a man cannot use the 
sickle, he may at least bind the sheaves!" 



ARTIFICIAL MORALITIES. 

T17E have recently passed, in our journey ings, hundreds of acres 
*' of hop vineyards. Busy hands were gathering the harvest, 
The " pickers" were mostly girls from the cities, getting high wages 
and a few weeks of fresh air, and a glimpse of green fields. 

The hop vineyards, as we passed them, seemed to our unsophis- 
ticated mind as pleasant places as any we saw in the fair landscapes 
before us. 

We took up one of our Puritan newspapers the other day, and 
our simplicity received a shock. We were gravely told that these 
pleasant fields, from which the wind wafted an aromatic fragrance 
into the close atmosphere of the crowded car as we passed, and 
whence now and then the clear voice of some pleasant singer 
greeted us, were only blotches on the sweet face of nature — foul 
sources of sin and misery. 

The sin of hop culture was gravely and solemnly denounced as 
the fruitful mother of many sins. The hop and the hop pole were 
Satan's instruments for the world's ruin ; and the man who planted 
a hop vine, or gathered a hop blossom — who in any way encour- 
aged a hop to climb, or offered a hop root for sale — was directly 
doing the devil's work ! 

We were naturally startled. Here was a terrible crime and 
curse, of which we had been utterly unsuspicious, growing and 
spreading all about us. We had, thoughtless that we are, enjoyed 
the pleasant sight, and pleased ourselves with the pleasant labor, 
as a traveller might, in utter ignorance of the hidden horror that 
yawned before us. 

And it was not one paper; but two, three, four. Indeed, some 
of our newspapers have been, for some time, making a special ter- 
ror of the unfortunate vegetable. They have boldly taken the 
ground that no Christian man can raise a hop vine. It is the for- 
bidden fruit. Here was a new sin — the sin of hop culture — a sin 
to be denounced in all pulpits. 

(163) 



164 Artificial Moralities. 

This is an instance of what we mean by artificial morality. There 
are scores of others ; but this will do to illustrate. The land is 
reeling drunk with sins. Two-thirds of its people are to-day outside 
the influence of any Christian organization. Vices are foul in the 
family, in the social circle, in the State- — foul and countless. Mar- 
riage is made a mere civil contract, dissolvable almost at pleasure. 
Licentiousness is legalized by unlimited divorce; and the most 
sacred ties of human society are dissolved at any man's or woman's 
whim. 

Fraud reigns in high places and in low. Business is rotten with 
lying, cheating, and perjury. The news of the day is a story, daily 
repeated, of swindling and robbery in the very innermost circles 
of the national trade. 

Bloodshed has become so common that we have our daily mur- 
ders at breakfast, and hardly think it worth a note. And a half- 
dozen suicides a day are a reasonable average. The physicians tell 
us " the slaughter of the innocents" is universal, not by Herod 
now, but by " Rachel" herself, who, however, is not " weeping" but 
rejoicing for her children, because they are not. 

These things, and such like, we see ; — the neglected and practi- 
cally heathen thousands of our great cities, the vice and poverty 
and disease that hide in wretched tenements, owned often by so- 
called Christian men, who keep vice and typhus yards unrebuked. 
And here, where all this stares us in the face, where we want God's 
plain Ten Commandments thundered into the ears of men — " Thou 
shalt not steal, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shaltnot kill, 
Thou shalt not covet," and the rest — we have proclaimed, as the last 
Puritan law, the enactment of the first importance — " Thou shalt 
not plant hops /" 

From the first, the tendency has been to invent mere artificial 
rights, and mere artificial wrongs. Men have sought to serve God 
beyond what is written — to give Him a will service; and the con- 
sequence has been invariably the same; — they have become care- 
less of the morality which is eternal. They have been intent on 
keeping up their little artificial self-willed bits of righteousness, 
and on denouncing their own privately manufactured sins, and 
have been often utterly oblivious of the righteousness of God's 
Commandments, and blind to the sins denounced in His plain 
laws. 

The Romanist is often very careful, as far as his artificial mo- 



Artificial Moralities. 1G5 

rality goes, and, at the same time, utterly immoral. There are no 
men more devout than the Italian banditti. They will pray long 
and fervently before the shrine of some favorite saint, for suc- 
cess in a contemplated robbery. They would be horrified at the 
thought of breaking a fast-day — they will commit a murder with- 
out scruple !•■ 

At home we see the same thing, though in ways less dangerous. 
Michael w 7 ould not for the world touch a bit of beef on Friday, 
but will drink himself wild on Saturday, without compunction ! 
Patrick would not break a fast on any account, but will break a 
head and think no harm of it. 

The whole minute system of artificial rights and wrongs which 
Komanism teaches, blinds the masses, in all Romish countries, to 
real rights and wrongs; so that there is no longer, as in Spain, 
Mexico or Italy, any connection whatever between religion and 
common decency. The greatest devotee is often the vilest scoun- 
drel, or the most endless liar. The observance of an artificial 
code has become the one sole measure of human right and duty ; 
and religion is utterly dissevered from daily life. 

But this is not confined to Romanism. Protestantism has acted 
in the same way, and reached often the same result. This is par- 
ticularly true of Puritan Protestantism, and particularly true of it 
in this country. 

It has shown great readiness to shut its eyes to plain downright 
sins, and to satisfy its conscience by the denunciation of what 
itself chooses to call sins. It has sought to atone for real wrongs, 
by waging war against fancied ones. It has been fierce against 
amusements; but has indulged itself in mad money-getting as 
life's one business. It has insisted on a Jewish Sabbath, and, at 
the same time, has allowed whole communities, in New England 
itself, to be, for years, without Christian worship on a Christian 
Sunday ! It has been ready enough to condemn the sins of other 
people, of people far away; it has been bitter enough and loud 
enough against their wrong-doing. It has been, so far, nearly 
dumb to a great rottenness that is eating out its life at home. 

So, in all times, as among the ancient Jews, there is the tempta- 
tion to invent observances as tests of obedience, and to omit the 
weightier matters of the law. And, as time passes, these small 
artificial observances come to be regarded as the real tests of 
Christian and religious character. The temptation needs to be 



166 Artificial Moralities. 

carefully guarded against. The Church does nothing among all 
her wise ways, wiser than to read the plain, clear, decisive Ten 
Commandments continually to her children. She thus brings 
them back to the foundations of honest Christian living — the 
doing justly, the loving mercy and the walking humbly before 
God — the real eternal morality, which man did not make, and 
can never change. 

She delivers their souls from slavishness to the mere notions of 
the day, from measuring rights and wrongs by the popular cries 
of the hour. 

Let them see well, that, while they stand fast in the liberty with 
which Christ has made them free, they also enjoy that liberty in 
hearty and full obedience to the law which sums their duty towards 
men, and their duty towards God, " in that state of life to which 
it hath pleased God to call them " each. 



" LAWYERS AND CHRISTIANITY." 

"DECENTLY we read an article in a sectarian cotemporary in 
•*■*' which a correspondent quotes some one asking the question, 
" Why is it that so few lawyers take an active part in Christian 
work, and so few eminent lawyers are known to be decided 
Christians ?" 

He accepts it as a fact that the question is a legitimate and 
natural one and then proceeds to give his reasons. 

We are not concerned with them. We hardly understand the 
religious dialect of some of our neighbors and, therefore, are per- 
haps wrong in the impression that among them "Christian work" 
means "Christian talk" for the writer seems to think that failing 
to " epeak in meeting" is the great failing, and, admitting that 
lawyers fail in that, he proceeds to guess why. He misses what, 
admitting the fact, we should think the great reason, viz : Law- 
yers have a pretty accurate knowledge of the value of talk on all 
matters and are the last men in the world to mistake it for work. 
Keligious talk, such as we find some of our neighbors are largely 
printing " lecture room talks" and reports of " prayer meetings," 
etc. — slip-shod goody twaddle, that one wonders why any mortal 
man should ever have thought it worth while to say, much less to 
•print, and which is yet, we suppose, the best sort of talk going 
among them, this religious talk we do not wonder they find the 
lawyers rather shy of. 

Bat because lawyers do not take part in this sort of thing (and 
that seems to be the complaint), is it fair to mark them out as a 
profession that takes no active part in Christian work, and of 
which few eminent ones are Christians? 

That is certainly not what Churchmen like to say. The num- 
ber of lawyers, eminent lawyers, who have taken part in active 
Christian work among us, who have been prominent in the coun- 
cils of the Church, active in her charities, liberal of time and 
influence and means for the advancement of her interests, has 

(167) 



168 "Lawyers and Christianity." 

been a noticeable thing among us from the first and it is a notice- 
able thing now. We have no need to complain of the silence of 
our lawyers, and certainly none of our laymen have shown more 
devotion and few of our clergy a more thorough understanding of 
our principles and a more enlightened defence of them than have 
been shown by some of our great lawyers. 

Were a Churchman to pick out any profession of which the 
question mentioned is not a question at all, he would pick out the 
legal profession. 

In our vestries, in our diocesan conventions, in our General 
Convention, as trustees of our institutions, as the advisers of the 
clergy and the bishops, large-minded, appreciative and large- 
hearted, our lawyers are our noticeable laymen. 

The names of Jay and Ogden, of Chambers and Hunt and Hugh 
Davey Evans, of Binney and Canfield, of Howe and Sheffey, of 
Comstock and Hendricks and McMurtrie and Blatchford, of John 
W. Andrews and John W. Stevenson, of Hamilton Fish and 
Robert C. Winthrop and Morrison R. Waite in the past, and in 
the present of Woolworth and Wilder and Bennett and Nash and 
Packard and Biddle, of Cortlandt Parker and Columbus Delano 
and George F. Edmunds and many such occur to a Churchman 
at once, and make the question a very unmeaning one to him. 

That the history of the Church of England should be adorned 
and illustrated by a long line of famous lawyers for three hundred 
years, might be explained by the fact of a united Church and 
State, but no such explanation holds here, and yet the American 
Church, in her short history, has comprised, among her most 
active and devoted laymen, many of the brighest names that have 
illustrated American law. 

The question, therefore, may be reversed for the Church, and 
we may ask why the difference is so great in this respect, between 
her and the other Christian bodies in the country ? 

The answer to that would take us into the very foundations on 
which she differs from them, the calm respect for old authority, 
the judicial temper in which she appeals to oldest and earliest 
precedents, the fact that her divine statute book has a divinely 
appointed witness and keeper and interpreter of its meaning, her 
wise constitution, which rests on the will of an ordered common- 
wealth, her legal and regular system of legislation, executive and 
judiciary, and then her worship, venerable and dignified and 



"Lawyers and Christianity." 169 

redolent of the best thought and the deepest devotion of English- 
speaking men — these hint the explanation of the fact, that for the 
students of that noblest science, next to theology, she has had 
marked attractions, and has never been without great lawyers as 
reverent communicants at her altars, and wise and earnest advisers 
in her councils, and that among all her children there are none 
whose names she will mention to the end of time with more 
sacred remembrance than some who have adorned the American 
bench and bar. 



PASTORAL WORK. 

THAT the rector should know his flock is one of the condi- 
tions essential to his duty. He should know them well. He 
should be able to call them " by name." He should understand 
their wants, their trials, their necessities. He should be able to 
sympathize with them in joy and in sorrow. 

All this is essential to the due fulfilling of his office. No 
learning can make up for the lack of personal knowledge and 
personal sympathy ; no clergyman in the pulpit can supply the 
place of pastoral intercourse and confidence. 

We admit all this. We insist upon it all. We believe in a 
pastorate, not in a mere preacherhood, not even in a mere priest- 
hood. " To seek for Christ's sheep that are dispersed abroad " 
is the perpetual duty of his ministry. 

But, admitting all this, how is the end best attained? In 
what way can the pastor best live in sympathy with his people? 
How best can he come near them and know them? He must 
not be a stranger. "They know not the voice of strangers." 
He has the care of their souls, and he must live among them so 
as in all ways to fulfil that care. How is he to know his people 
and have them know him? 

" By pastoral visiting," is the answer. And we reply, " Very 
good, if you mean such pastoral visiting as will effect the end." 

To see his people in their houses, to converse with them at 
their own firesides, to become acquainted with them in the fam- 
ily circle, might answer the purpose, if these things were possible. 

And many a pastor sets patiently and laboriously to work, 
supposing them to be possible. Pastoral duty with him means 

(170) 



Pastoral Work. 171 

"parochial calls," and he sets about his duty faithfully. He 
goes his rounds, ringing bells and rattling knockers with a per- 
severance that commands our respect and sympathy. He de- 
votes to his business the greater part of his week-days, and 
tramps in all weathers on his beat. 

But his parochial calls, as it dawns upon him gradually, are 
mere " calls." There is no pastoral duty connected with them 
as a rule. He sees only the women of the household. The 
men are at their offices or shops; the children are at school. 
He makes polite calls upon the ladies. There is possibly some 
result ; one result is quite apparent — three fourths of all his con- 
gregation are women! 

In the circumstances of our modern life in cities and large 
towns true parochial calls are impossible. The family are to- 
gether only in the evening, not always then. And in large con- 
gregations, under the charge, as they very generally are, of one 
presbyter, it would be quite impossible, even if the families 
stayed at home, for the pastor to make his calls very frequently, 
that is, if he pretended to do any duty besides. 

That the accepted style of parochial calls meets the case at 
all, that these calls make the pastor acquainted with his people 
and their spiritual necessities, is out of the question. 

That very portion of his flock which needs most his care, 
which is most exposed to the temptations of the world, the flesh, 
and the devil, is the portion his so-called "calls" never bring 
him into contact with. 

It is a part of our disorganization that this ineffectual and 
clumsy method is the only way we have to bring pastor and 
people together. On Sundays the people come to the church, 
and in the public offices of religion both meet. At other times, 
if the pastor would find his people, he must take his chances of 
seeing them, one here and another there, and all occupied with 
pressing duties. 

Is there no way to bring them together by a common interest 
and make them acquainted in some common work? Parochial 



172 Pastoral Work. 

calls as they are now managed are calls to talk. Might not there 
be some arrangement where pastor and people would meet to 
work ? 

Among our people, in large parishes especially, it is not only 
the case that the people are not sufficiently acquainted with their 
pastor; they are not sufficiently acquainted with one another. 
The family relation, which is an essential feature in the Church 
of God, has no existence. People sit sometimes for months 
and years in opposite pews, and go up together to the same altar, 
and remain entire strangers. No amount of parochial calls made 
by the pastor on the ladies of the two families will bring the 
families any nearer together. 

It is possible in small places and in new parishes, where people 
are all in about the same circumstances, where there are none 
rich and none needy, for the pastor, with much labor and a 
great expenditure of time, to do his pastoral work reasonably 
satisfactorily by the system of regular visitation from house to 
house, with all its disadvantages. It is not possible at all in 
large parishes in cities. 

What is needed in this matter is what we need in so many 
other matters — organization. 

The parochial-call system goes on the idea that the clergy- 
man is to do all the work of the parish. It accepts the parish 
as existing merely to be served ; it does not consider it as an 
organization which has a definite work and duty of its own. We 
need hardly say that here lies much of the failure of our work. 
Most parish clergymen find it soon enough, and most of them, 
we believe, find no way out of the difficulty. They labor on 
under an arrangement which seems to take it for granted that 
they are hired to look after a certain number of " families and 
individuals " as best they can, and that these families have noth- 
ing to do except pay their share for being looked after! 

There is another theory of the parish or congregation, which 
is the New Testament theory and very widely different from 
this. 



Pastoral Work. 173 

That theory looks at the congregation as an organized divi- 
sion of Christ's kingdom, organized and officered for work. The 
Church is a working institution, sent not only to talk, but to do. 
The clergyman is the leader and director of a band of workmen, 
" fellow-workers with God," set at the world-long work of saving 
the world. His responsibility may be greater than that of any 
member of the band, his accountability to the Master more di- 
rect and solemn. But a part of that responsibility and accoun- 
tability is that he not only work himself, but direct and press on 
the work of those committed to his charge. 

That a pastor should consider his pastoral work performed by 
stated calls at the houses of an idle people, and that they should 
consider their duty to be to do nothing except to treat the pastor 
kindly when he does call, and that this on both sides should be 
counted "pastoral work," is a thing that might well amaze us 
had we not become so forgetful of the real purpose and duty of 
the Church and its various congregations. It is quite as well 
that such a sham should fail us, and that we should all see the 
failure. 

Suppose we take the theory of the New Testament, that a 
church is an organized institution for teaching men, for preach- 
ing the Gospel, for doing all works of charity and mercy to its 
own members and to all men as far as it has power and the call. 
Suppose we consider the pastor as the leader and director of this 
working body. Can we not see ways in which the most close 
and active sympathy will arise between pastor and people, in 
which confidence and love and interest will be multiplied beyond 
anything now brought to pass? 

The pastor does not go to spend an idle half -hour with one 
or two members of the family. He has organizations for this 
work or the other, and he meets members together, interested 
in a common purpose ; meets to counsel and advise, and hear 
reports of progress, and talk over work done and work proposed. 
He meets them with a purpose ; they meet him with a purpose. 
There is a reality and an earnestness about the whole matter 



174 Pastoral Work. 

which does more to break the ice of diffidence and bring people 
acquainted than a week's mere talk. 

There is work enough in all our parishes, our city parishes 
especially, waiting to be done, and which lies undone now be- 
cause there is no real pastoral work possible, because the clergy- 
man has failed to find something for all his people to do. 

The women should be organized for such work as they, and 
they only, can do ; for visiting the poor, for looking after desti- 
tute households, neglected children, and young women away 
from home. The younger women should be banded together 
for work appropriate to them, of which there is always a plenty. 
The men should be organized for such work as they only can 
perform, and the young men should have their brotherhood 
with its various activities. 

A choral society should exist to make the music of the sanc- 
tuary what it should be. A society to find out and interest 
young men who are strangers, or have fallen out of habits of 
church attendance, would find occupation. An association to 
provide, in a large parish, a library and a reading-room would 
be a society that would do a good work in every city. Another 
which would undertake the conduct of an occasional course of 
lectures on church principles, or even on some scientific or his- 
torical matter of interest, would be a useful work. A committee 
to see that strangers had seats in the church would not be out 
of place. A society to encourage responses in public worship 
would be an advantage in many parishes. Another to make 
parishioners in the same parish acquainted would not be useless. 
A band trained for catechists to assist the pastor in the most 
important duty of catechising the young would be most useful 
in almost any of our congregations. 

There are a hundred lines of effort in which the members of 
a congregation might be thus engaged and interested for edifi- 
cation and good works. The laity are, we believe, willing to 
work. They complain often that they are not employed when 
they desire to be. We believe the complaint is an honest one. 



Pastoral Work. 175 

Earnest Christian men and women always want to do something. 
They cannot tell what to set about. They desire leadership. 
The leadership does not exist. They are driven to busy them- 
selves with schemes that are crude and fruitless, or they fall into 
apathy. There is nothing more wanted at the present than 
intelligent and wise organizations for lay workers, men and 
women. 

And 'such organizations will not only give them work, but 
they will also make it possible for the clergy to be real pastors. 
Such organizations would bring the clergy and the. people to- 
gether ; they would give the sympathy of a common absorbing 
interest ; they would bring all the congregation acquainted, all 
into the family relations which belong to the Church of God. 

We really do not think that our parishes can do their duty 
where pastoral work consists in formal calls upon the ladies, 
and the only organization for good works is the sewing society. 
Under the circumstances, we do not wonder that the business 
of religion in so many households is left to the women. 

Have we nothing to offer men ? Have we no work to give 
them ? Have we no pastoral system which will bring the pastor 
face to face with the men of his congregation, and put him in 
the place of a leader in good works which they do? They 
cannot attend the sewing society. On the whole, they do not. 
greatly admire it, perhaps. Nevertheless they do desire to oc- 
cupy themselves in some common good work. Can such not 
be found for them? 

The sick, the poor, the suffering, the wanderers, the inquiring, 
these are especially the good pastor's care. The rest he should 
consider woi'kers. He should expect them to work, and provide 
work for them, and organize them to do it to the best advan- 
tage. A parish should be a hive. All are in it for mutual good 
and for good to others, and all who can work should have some 
work set before them. None should have to go far to find 
something which he or she can do for the Lord's service. 

This is the only solution we see to questions which are every 



176 Pastoral Work. 

day becoming more pressing in the largeness of the harvest and 
the fitness of the laborers. We must return to the old theory 
that the business of a Christian is not to sit at home to be "called" 
upon, but to rise up and be at work at some part of this enormous 
job of saving the world, which the Master has given his Church 
to do. 



THE SERMON TRADE. 

CUSTOM requires that two sermons be preached in most Prot- 
estant houses of worship each Sunday. In most of the de- 
nominations the main part of the worship consists in listening 
to the sermon. Children used to be taught — indeed, we do not 
know but what they are so taught yet — that it is a sort of reli- 
gious duty— indeed, the most solemn and high religious duty — 
to listen to the sermon, and that in listening to it they are some- 
how doing a service well-pleasing to God. 

The demand for sermons being so regular and constant, a 
good portion of the time of a young man preparing for the 
ministry of one of our denominations is necessarily taken up in 
learning how to make sermons. There are books which profess 
to teach the mysteries of the art, which lay down rules and give 
advice, so that after going through them a young man of or- 
dinary skill and intelligence shall be able to make a sermon on 
any given text according to rule. In fact, in a good many 
theological seminaries it is considered the main business to teach 
a young man the trade of sermonizing, the art of manufacturing 
sermons ad libitum. In such schools the world is held to con- 
sist of two classes, the men who make sermons and the men 
who listen to them when made ; and the chief end of the Chris- 
tian Church and ministry is to get sermons preached continually 
to full houses. 

The definition of the modern denominational ministry is— 
preacher hood. It consists of a body of men whose duty it is to 
deliver a sermon on every possible opportunity, under the im- 

(177) 



178 The Sermon Trade. 

pression that they are thereby "preaching the Gospel." They 
are men who are forever on the lookout for an audience to 
harangue. The great event of their past life was their last 
sermon ; the great event of the future is the next. They have 
learned, or have picked up, the trade of sermon-making. They 
have been honestly taught that this trade is a most important 
one— indeed, a sacred and divine business altogether; and in 
their eyes now the world is going right or going wrong ex- 
actly according to the way in which it listens to sermons made 
according to the orthodox pattern, which is, of course, their 
pattern. 

And since the work and business of the ministry has been 
reduced to this among our dissenting brethren ; since all claim 
on a priesthood has been given up, all pretense to speak in 
God's name and as his messengers has been scouted ; and 
since the whole matter has resolved itself into the making of 
sermons — what wonder that in this reading age, and among a 
people who have, like Silas Wegg, "all print open to them," 
so many should conclude that they can read a great deal better 
sermon than they can hear, and so conclude to stay away from 
the sermonizing business altogether? 

As the age becomes more intellectual, therefore, as more and 
more men become familiar with the great treasures of English 
literature and the great mines of English thought, they are less 
disposed to recognize the divine right of any man to bore them 
with commonplaces, under the claim that his wares are the 
" Gospel." 

And so men are saying, " The pulpit is losing its hold on the 
world." Decidedly it is. And if the pulpit is the whole of 
Christianity, if there is no priesthood and no sacraments, if there 
is not even a pastorate, if the whole business of the ministry is 
to incubate for six days two sermons to preach on the seventh, 
then the sooner it loses its hold the better. All the sermons 
preached in the United States next Sunday will not hold as 
much thought or represent as much intellectual or spiritual power 



The Sermon Trade. 179 

as are contained in a dozen printed pages of Hooker or as many 
of Taylor's " Holy Dying." 

But our purpose is rather to call attention to a curious result 
of the enormous demand for sermons. 

There are, of course, labor-saving contrivances in all business. 
The age is an age especially given to labor-saving inventions. 

In addition, therefore, to the books which teach the art of 
making a sermon by rule, we have a mass of books which con- 
tain the dry bones of endless sermons — "skeletons," they call 
them, and the name is well chosen. Somewhere we have seen 
a book called " Five Hundred Sketches and Skeletons of Ser- 
mons." Its name indicates its use. Somewhere we have met 
with "Simeon's Skeletons," an older work of the same class. 
We have seen or heard of " Pulpit Helps," another book of the 
same sort. Indeed, we suspect there are a large number of such 
productions to save labor and enable the hide-bound brain to 
deliver itself of other men's thoughts. 

Before us lies a little book, dreary-looking — indeed, horrid and 
repulsive-looking, as well it may. " Pulpit Germs" is the name 
of it. It is a whole museum of skeletons — skeleton sermons. It 
is a Philadelphia notion, and any unhappy preacher may here 
find a couple of anatomies to put flesh and skin on and galvanize 
into some spasmodic imitation of life for next Sunday's pulpit 
performance. For a half-hour the things may be made to wave 
their arms and wag their heads in imitation of life, if well set 
up and wired. 

But the matter has been carried further than the providing of 
skeletons. There is, after all, a good deal of work in putting 
on the skin and flesh ; so we have the skeletons covered and 
clothed, and offered for sale ready made up to look as natural 
as life. 

In England we learn that " a private circular has been sent 
to the clergy announcing the approaching issue of a periodical 
to be composed entirely of sermons and to be sold exclusively to 
gentlemen in holy orders." 



180 The Sermon Trade. 

This seems to be, however, only a leaf out of a Yankee 
book. England is only waking up to the advancement of the 
age. 

But even this is not advance enough. There is still the trouble 
of copying out in a fair hand these ready-made sermons, and 
that is dull work. 

So it is said that for a long time past "lithograph sermons," 
made to imitate manuscript exactly, with blots and interlinea- 
tions complete to deceive the galleries, have been a standing 
article of trade. 

For our own part, we cannot join in any violent denunciation 
of these proceedings. 

If sermons be the one thing wanted, is a man to blame who 
tries to get them up of the very best? And as he may be quite 
unable to do much at the business himself (it is many an honest 
man's case), why should he not put himself to some inconve- 
nience^ and even expense, to supply his flock with the best article 
of sermons in the market? 

It is clearly possible that the gentlemen who write sermons 
for the booksellers, either to be lithographed or printed, may 
by practice attain a high degree of excellence. They will con- 
fine themselves to that particular business, and, devoting all their 
thoughts to it, having books and leisure, it is easy to see that an 
educated man of good literary culture could furnish sermons 
vastly better than those produced by more than one out of a 
thousand of the preachers. 

There is this further advantage : the preacher will have his 
thoughts undistracted. We know how important delivery and 
emphasis and gesture are. Some people consider them the 
greater half of preaching in all cases. Now by this plan the 
preacher can give his whole mind to the delivery, can practise and 
study and gesticulate till he has reached perfection. What might 
we, then, not hope for? Able sermons splendidly delivered in 
all pulpits. Why, we have reached the very dawn of the mil- 
lennium, according to the notion of our denominational friends, 



The Sermon Trade. 181 

who denounce a priesthood and hang the world's salvation on 
a preacherhood! 

There is a good deal to be said for the " National Pulpit " 
and for lithographed sermons by a practical man. On the side 
of the congregation, who have to listen, there are materials for 
a strong case in their favor. They have a right to the best. It 
is of no consequence from what maker the article be obtained, 
so it be satisfactory. 

And so a hard-headed Englishman of the old type, who was 
bound to do his duty, once expressed himself. 

He had, after much pains and labor, succeeded in " restoring " 
a rather dilapidated parish church. He had built a school-house, 
repaired the vicarage, put all the outward covering of the church 
in good case. 

On occupying for the first time the newly restored church, 
bright with stained windows and polychromed roof, well ap- 
pointed and churchly in all respects, he congratulated his people. 
They had done nobly. But he was not content ; he was anxious 
to have many more good works done in the parish ; they must 
not stop there. He, for his part, would do his duty if they 
would but second him as they had already done. He was old, 
to be sure, and breaking up a bit ; and he had heard that some 
people complained that he did not preach as some of these 
younger brethren did, fresh from the university. But he assured 
them that they should have no cause of complaint in the future. 
If his parishioners would stand by their old vicar, they too 
should have the best sermons to be found in the market every 
Sunday, if he had " to pay a crown apiece for them "/ 



A DANGER AND A WEAKNESS. 

« 

THE great mass of the population of any of our cities have 
but a small stake in the prosperity, or even in the existence, 
of the city. So hard are their lives, so little have they to lose, 
that almost any change may promise them good. Come what 
will, they cannot be greatly worse off than they are, and it is 
possible they may be greatly better. 

The hundred-handed Briareus, the clumsy giant of brute force, 
lies uneasily tossing in his sleep, beneath the surface on which 
we build our respectabilities and accumulate our wealth. Half 
the wit of the world, and for years all its "statesmanship," have 
been exercised in trying to keep the giant sleeping; but now 
and again he half awakes, tosses his arms uneasily about, jars 
our building about our ears, and gives us a hint of his capacities 
should he ever awake fully. 

In this country we have been living in a fools' paradise so 
far. We imagined we had discovered the method of cajoling 
our giant into dreaming permanently, or had converted Him 
to good order and profound reverence for the respectabilities. 
Our nostrum of universal suffrage, we used to imagine, would 
settle all the problems of the world. We have got tolerably 
well over that superstition, although we have left it as a con- 
viction, on the minds of certain simple-minded statesmen in 
England, that " manhood suffrage " and the millennium are the 
same. 

The truth is, there will be, as far as we can see, differences, 
and great differences, in the material condition of men under 

(182) 



A Danger and a Weakness. 183 

all political arrangements. There will be millionaires and beg- 
gars in a republic as in a monarchy. In a great city there will 
be those who live in palaces and fare sumptuously every day 
and those who live in tenement-houses and hovels and make 
close acquaintance with foul air, discomfort, wretchedness, 
poverty, and disease. 

And the last class will always be the larger. It will be the 
class, too, that holds in its hands the brute force at least. The 
other class is in its power in every land in Christendom. It is 
the salvation of social order that this class, which possesses the 
physical power, does not know its power, cannot organize its 
forces nor generally act together. If it learned that once, the 
wealth and respectability of London or New York would be at 
its mercy, as were the other day the wealth and respectability 
of Paris. 

Despotisms recognize this class at least and keep it down. 
They arrange systematically against its combinations, its intelli- 
gent and united action, as one main function of government. 

In a free government this class is not recognized at all. There 
are no classes ; the rich man and the poor man vote equally. 
But the fact is not destroyed merely because it is not recognized 
officially. And meanwhile the education which a free polity 
gives in political wisdom, in party combination and management, 
and the opening it offers to shrewd demagogues, give just the 
training to this class, in the sense and feeling of its own strength 
and importance, which is needed to render its power effective. 

On more than one occasion New York has been scared out 
of its propriety by the sudden emergence into activity of a 
power at whose will its millionaires hold their possessions. 
Need we wonder that its wealth is so obsequious to this power? 
that in its terror it consents to pamper it and bribe it, that it 
may keep it a little longer quiet? 

We are in the land of hope, it is true ; but hope that makes 
us shut our eyes to facts is no rational hope. And the fact is 
that here, as everywhere, and with increased rapidity since the 



184 A Danger and a Weakness. 

war, the two classes of rich and poor are becoming more and 
more marked, and are drifting daily farther apart in life, thought, 
interest, and habit. 

But with us numbers only count ; and as the ppor men will 
always outnumber the rich, the rich must be content to hold 
their property submissive to the demands of the poor. This, 
they say, is already distinctly acknowledged among us, and the 
wealthiest among us are the most cowardly when it comes to a 
question of blackmailing rich men to control the votes of poor 
men. 

In New York the near sense of this force that lies below is 
stronger than in any of our cities, because New York receives 
the European tide and is not so easily relieved by the outlet of 
the vast empty spaces westward, which have been so far our 
safety-valve. But New York is only the first to show the tend- 
ency, as being the most prominent and the farthest on the road 
which every American city is fast traveling. 

The enmity between capital and labor, the bitter hatred of 
those that have not toward those that have more than they know 
what to do with, are things universal suffrage has not annihi- 
lated, things which we in this country will be called some day 
to meet, as men have been called to meet them in other coun- 
tries. 

And we come to meet them under certain marked disadvan- 
tages. 

In the first place, our wealth is shopkeeping wealth ; it has 
been gained usually by the owner. It is wealth which suggests 
no responsibility to others. Hereditary wealth, especially if, as 
in England, in lands, carries with it hereditary obligations. 
There are tenants on a man's estate, born on it as were their 
fathers before them, and they have certain well-defined moral 
rights at least, which no landlord can afford, in the face of public 
opinion, to neglect or outrage. 

But money made by a man in the exercise of his own skill, 
energy, and industry does not naturally suggest any right in it 



A Danger and a Weakness. 185 

toward others. The owner has "made it." He owes little 
thanks to anybody, perhaps, for helping him; he made it in 
spite of other people, it may be; and he has a certain fierce 
sense of ownership which insists on barring out other people. 
His wealth is a part of his own personality — his own "worth" 
in a sense in which inherited wealth never can be. He resents 
at once any claim that others make upon it. " He was a poor 
boy himself, had no better chances than other poor men's sons. 
Let them work, as he did, and they need no help from anybody." 

The large giving of money by men of wealth for public uses 
is a thing almost to be learned in its rudiments in this country. 
There is probably no civilized people among whom the expen- 
diture of money is so largely a private matter, in which the 
community has no share. 

But still more, in the rudeness of our "fierce democracy," 
where there are no distinctions save what wealth gives, it is 
natural that those distinctions should be emphasized. 

More and more the wealthy classes surround themselves with 
all the barriers that wealth can build against the intrusion of 
other classes, who are "just as good as anybody, and perhaps 
a little better," barring the money. More and more they isolate 
themselves in all the habits of their lives, their work and their 
play, their business and their amusements. Even in the most 
despotic countries, in some public fete, in some national pastime, 
in some day of popular enjoyment, rich and poor, noble and 
peasant, meet and recognize a common interest, a common 
nationality, a common manhood. In America the tendency is 
indicated by the pet slang for the very highest respectability 
and the most superfine " aristocracy " we know : " They are very 
exclusive." They have reached the height at last : they can 
exclude, shut out, other people from their interests and their 
lives. Indeed, in the minds of many the admirable thing about 
great wealth is that it will enable people to be "exclusive." 

But, further, in almost every country else there is o?ie common 
meeting-ground of rich and poor, peasant and prince. What- 



186 A Danger and a Weakness. 

ever we may object against religious establishments, there is 
this to be said for them : they afford that common ground. At 
God's altar, in God's house, in humble parish church where the 
peasants' fathers molder in the old churchyard, and the noble's 
ancestors rest beneath sculptured marble in chancel and in aisle 
or in grand cathedral where the nation's honored dead sleep in 
the carved gloom of arch and column, there at least all men are 
equal, and rich and poor meet together as brethren. The Chris- 
tian Church, even in her darkest days, has preached the old 
Gospel of human brotherhood faithfully. 

But with ourselves all this has changed. The Congregational 
idea, which had the power to dominate largely over the thought 
of all religious bodies, when translated out of religious phrases 
into plain English, amounts to this : " Let people who want 
religion provide themselves with religion." 

The idea in a poor and frugal community, where the distinc- 
tions of wealth and poverty were almost unknown, did not for 
a while work so badly. Almost everybody wanted religion and 
almost everybody was able to do his part toward providing for 
his wants. 

But as the land's condition changes, as more and more wealth 
is accumulated in the hands of the few, and those few are still 
possessed with the Congregational idea that a man's religion, 
like his house and his carriage, his dinners and his wines, is 
something the man must look out for himself, — as it is his own 
business and nobody else's, — the old common ground of a 
common Christianity is also drifting away from us, and rich and 
poor in America do not meet together, even in church. 

The culmination of the Congregational idea is reached when 
pews are put up to the highest bidder. The most money wins. 
It is approached very nearly when a costly church is built in 
which nobody but rich men can buy pews. But the idea is at 
work in every place, in cities especially, where pews are rented, 
and the church and all its belongings are considered the prop- 
erty of the individuals who rent the pews, a property they can 



A Danger and a Weakness. 187 

sell and carry away with them when they remove to another 
part of the city. 

In all cases the church is not common property, its floor is 
not common ground. People have vested rights in it, as they 
have in other property. It is one of the distinctions of wealth 
to have such rights, and people are so little awake to the wrong 
of the whole business that they even congratulate themselves on 
the " exclusiveness " of the church they attend. 

To us here is the most dangerous thing we know in American 
life. The rich and the poor, capital and labor, are drifting apart 
daily farther in all their habitudes. The muttering of com- 
munism and the international breaks occasionally on our quiet. 
The one place where the brotherhood of all men is recognized, 
where the old foundations of a common manhood, greater in its 
awful dignity than all earthly differences, overwhelming in its 
eternal interests the little jealousies of time, — the one place 
where those abide and men are ranked as comrades to fight a 
common foe, — no longer exists among us. 

We have drawn the distinctions of classes deeper and wider 
than any people ever dared. We have made the "common 
salvation" itself "exclusive." We have bought up Christianity 
and sold religion to the highest bidder, as we sell any other 
thing in the market. 

Meanwhile the uneasy heavings of blind power sway and 
swing beneath us. The classes with the strong arms and the 
bold speech, the hungry hearts and the envious eyes, are letting 
the others go their way, letting them take what they call "reli- 
gion " with them, and biding their time. 

"What can we do?" it is asked. "We cannot build or 
support churches in any way but the present." 

We have only to say we must do something, and the sooner 
the better. One of the first things to do is to rise to the com- 
prehension of what the Church of God is — the very first thing. 
The rest, it appears to us, will follow. Meanwhile one thing 
is certain : that every day we allow the impression to deepen 



188 A Danger and a Weakness. 

that what we call " religion" is one of the privileges of wealth 
heaps up a heritage of hatred and contempt against Church and 
clergy, which will one day be too powerful for both. 

And every day, as the times move on and the interests of 
rich and poor separate, as their lives separate, if Christianity 
cannot find a common bond to hold these two as brethren and 
make the poor man's cause her own, then there is not an exist- 
ing element in our civilization that can, and the triumph in a 
free republic with universal suffrage of communism, and the 
anarchy which follows, is but a question of time. 

Votes are powerful, and votes may take it into their heads, 
having the power in their hands, to vote themselves all rich 
some day and own pews in " exclusive " churches to their hearts' 
content. 



THE TENEMENT-HOUSE. 

THAT physical causes have much to do with moral degra- 
dation or elevation is a proposition which few persons will 
now dispute. 

No man concerned for the intellectual or moral well-being of 
his race can afford to ignore the physical conditions under which 
the community lives. 

In great cities generally these physical conditions are often 
direct temptations to immorality and vice. It is on this account 
that great cities are great evils, ulcers on the body politic, sick- 
ening it all through. 

People live in crowded garrets or crowded cellars. " Home " 
is one or two rooms in a caravansary. It has none of the as- 
sociations which make the word sacred in our speech ; it means 
crowding, foul air, dirt, discomfort, and wretchedness too often. 

In England attention has been called for some time past to 
the principle we have mentioned, and better, healthier, cleaner 
quarters for the residence of working people have been an end 
kept steadily in view. The clergy working in the crowded alleys 
of London have recognized it as a part of their duty to call 
attention to the need of better homes for the laboring classes, 
if there is to be any permanent improvement among them. And 
the result is that the health returns of London, a good indication 
of much besides, show that that vast city is healthier than the 
average village or open country of the kingdom. Its death-rate 
is about half that of New York. 

We have done things in haste hitherto in this country, and 

(189) 



190 The Tenement-House. 

in addition there has been among us no sense of responsibility 
in proprietorship, which hereditary wealth brings. How our 
cities are built, or how human beings are herded in the shelters 
provided them, is nobody's business but the builder's or the 
landlord's. 

The raid of the police on the cellar-dwellers of New York, 
ordered under pressure of an expected invasion of cholera, re- 
vealed a condition of things unknown to thousands of lifelong 
residents of that city and horrible to contemplate. People were 
living actually in holes i?i the groimd, without light and without 
air, a dozen in a bunch, in places nine or ten feet square, over- 
run with vermin and rotting with disease — and of course New 
York is a Christian city. It has been stated that the cave- 
dwellers of New York are twenty thousand of its population. 

The peculiar feature of the city is, however, the tenement- 
house. The tenement-house is a large building, sometimes 
fronting on a street, sometimes on an alley, sometimes with no 
frontage at all, but built in the back yard of other houses and 
reached by an archway underneath them, three, four, and up 
to seven stories in height, in which rooms are rented singly or 
by twos or threes to families or individuals as they can afford. 
The house is cheaply constructed ; its drainage and ventilation 
are as it may please Providence ; and it swarms with life, human, 
animal, and insect. 

It is curious that New York should have reproduced a style 
of building which has had no existence since the fall of Rome. 
The New York tenement-house is only the modern type of the 
Roman insula. The insula was a block (distinct and apart, with 
surrounding narrow streets and passages, and therefore insula, 
or island) of vast height, divided into lodging-rooms, in which 
a common class of Romans were herded and for which they 
paid rent. The patrician had his domus, or home, and he only, 
the distinct or separate dwelling-place for the family. The 
masses had no homes ; they swarmed in the insulae like mites in 
old cheeses. Each family had its lair. 



The Tenement-House. 191 

But the Roman had this advantage : he had little or nothing 
to do. He was in a mild climate; he was fed by the public 
allowance of corn ; he had the porticos of the public buildings 
to lounge in ; he was in a city that burned no coal, had no gas, 
no rotting docks, and no smoky manufactories. He used his 
lair in the insulae to sleep in, and that was about all. He might 
spend his whole day and eat his scanty meal in the open air, or 
lounge in the porticos and public baths. 

It is because the enormous swarms of the insulae have not 
been allowed for that Gibbon and others have been disposed to 
put the population of Rome so low. They really had no com- 
prehension of what such a building was, nor how many human 
creatures may be packed in it. A small experience with New 
York would have shown them that the capacity of close pack- 
age is about the same in humanity as in herrings. 

There is a tenement block in the city which, a political gentle- 
man informed us last year, would furnish twelve hundred voters 
of a particular ticket. There are single rooms where seventeen 
people have been found to live, cook, eat, and sleep. There 
are cases discovered where two or three families occupy one 
room. For four, five, or six stories, from garret to alley, one of 
these buildings literally swarms with men, women, and children. 
The air is stifling, the odors horrible, the dirt fearful to contem- 
plate. The rooms on each successive floor open from common 
passageways, narrow, filthy generally, and lined with buckets or 
dust-heaps from the various rooms. Children tumble up and 
down the creaking stairs and broken banisters— the only place 
the poor little creatures have to play, except the gutter, or the 
yard, dirtier than the gutter, the common receptacle of all out- 
thro wings from several hundred families. 

If the tenement-house is built, as it often is, in the back yard 
of other houses (they are so crowded in New York that they 
actually build churches in back yards, to which you enter by a 
passage from the street), the conditions are intensified in their 
wretchedness. 



192 The Tenement-House. 

It was our duty, when rector of a city parish, to bury from 
such a tenement a poor sewing-woman, who had died of con- 
sumption. We found the way through an arched passage under 
a row of respectable houses masking the tenement on the street. 
In rear of this row, and closed in by rows all around, stood a 
four-story brick block swarming in the usual way. The ther- 
mometer marked nineties everywhere, and in the fetid air and 
among the pestilential steams from the confined space, in which 
several hundred human beings lived, we wondered rather at the 
smallness than the largeness of our bills of mortality. 

But it is not health only ; it is morals that concern us. How 
can human beings live under such conditions without degrada- 
tion? Outside the wretchedest hovel in the country there are 
God's green fields at least ; and then the hut is the family's 
own. But in such a swarming den as one of these tenement- 
houses there is no privacy, no sacredness of family singleness, 
no self-respect possible, at least amid bawling women, quarrel- 
ing men, and screaming children, amid heat and dirt and stench 
below and above and all around ; and outside there is the gutter 
for the children, the street for the young girls, and the whisky 
hole at every corner for the parents. 

Such "homes," better or worse, — and the worse oftener, we 
fear, — New York provides for its working-men and -women, its 
future fathers and mothers and rulers. Would it be exaggera- 
tion to say that our New York insulae shelter one half of our 
New York population? Have one half of our families a domus, 
a roof which shelters the family by itself ? In such homes as 
these half the little children in the great city are living or dying 
— dying often, mercifully for themselves and all about them, 
we doubt not— in our modern Christian "slaughter of the in- 
nocents." 

The tenement-house, as that institution stands at this day, is 
the one obstacle, and the insuperable obstacle, in the way of 
moral or physical cleansing and health. It is a thing to make 
us blush for our civilization. It is a ghastly, heathenish impor- 



The Tenement-House. 193 

tation, and without the conditions that made its prototype 
tolerable. 

That the tenement-house should not only breed disease ; that 
it should not only be a slaughter-house of children, who die by 
hundreds when they might live ; that it should also sustain the 
liquor shops on every corner, and keep up the supply of ghastly 
gaiety that flaunts beneath the gaslight on the streets, that it 
should send the boys who do not die when babies to the " island " 
or to Sing-Sing, and the girls who do not perish with cholera 
infantum to the street, is only natural. That it should not do 
all this more than it has is not its fault, but due to the moral 
stamina of a people who have still about them the breath of 
good green earth and the memory of Christian homes. Let it 
work on three generations, and then what? 

Who is responsible for this thing? The rich men who own 
the tenement-houses, and while we write, at Saratoga, at New- 
port, or in European capitals, are living on the lives often of 
their tenants. 

That is the plain English of the case. These people have 
invested their money in this property because it pays — pays 
better, it is said, twice over, than any other real-estate invest- 
ment possible. And they are responsible for a degradation, 
moral and physical, to which they are deliberately exposing a 
large population. 

People are pressed for room in New York ; that is true. Tak- 
ing the whole, bare as it is, it is the most densely peopled city 
in the known world — fifty-odd thousand to the square mile. 

But what is science for, and what skill and enterprise and 
common sense, to say nothing of Christianity, if the wealth of 
our capitalists cannot solve the problem of healthy, cleanly 
homes for those whose strong arms make our wealth, where a 
working-man may dwell and bring up his family in self-respect? 
Has the world made no advance since the degraded Roman, 
fed with public corn for his voice and vote, crawled to his lair 
in the insula eighteen hundred years ago? 



194 The Tenement-House. 

The lesson of responsibility for wealth, responsibility in all 
ownership, the alphabet fact that a man has no right to use 
property for his own sole purposes, that the use he makes of it 
determines his right to its enjoyment, is a lesson yet to be 
learned in this country. It may be learned quietly and naturally, 
but it must be learned, even if a population brought up in tene- 
ment-houses has to teach sometime in a way sharp and sudden 
and with little heed of the scholars' feelings. 



"HOW SHALL WE REACH THE MASSES?" 

WE have put here a question which is put very often. At 
any gathering of the clergy, at convocations, conventions, 
missionary meetings, the question, " How shall we reach the 
masses? " is not an uncommon question. In many of our re- 
ligious papers of all sorts it is as common. 

What is the meaning of this word, the "masses"? We do 
not recollect hearing a speaker upon this subject begin with a 
definition. Christianity knows no such class as the masses. 
Democracy does not, or ought not. 

But gathering our definition from the rather loose talking of 
speakers and the loose writing of writers, we suppose they mean 
the body of American citizens who are not rich, and who do not 
go to church or rent or own pews in churches. Who are not 
rich / We want that understood. For a gentleman who has 
made a competence by stock- gambling, for instance, need never 
go to church, but his not going does not put him among the 
masses. The gentleman who has not gambled in stocks or 
otherwise, but has worked patiently and honestly at his trade 
of carpenter and has to work at it still, is one of the masses if 
he does not come to church. And we are all puzzled about how 
to reach him. 

It has settled itself in our conviction, from what we have 
heard, that the dreadful masses are the mechanics, laborers, and 
the like who do not attend church. The people who spend 
their Sundays at Jerome Park or at the Union Club are not the 
masses, though they should not enter a church once a year. 

(195) 



196 "How Shall We Reach the Masses?" 

You may live on Fifth Avenue and never attend church, and 
you will not be a mass ; but if you should live on Avenue A, 
you would be a mass at all missionary meetings, whether you 
go to church or not. If you go you have been " reached"; 
if you do not, you are a mass yet unreached. It is all very 
odd. 

The reader will perceive we have small respect for the phrase. 
In truth, it is snobbish and contemptible, whether those who 
use it know or do not know how contemptible and how snobbish. 
It is a revelation of the spirit which lumps all working people in 
one lump, as if they were different clay from the people who, 
by honesty or dishonesty, by industry or knavery, contrive to 
live in fine houses. And when we hear the phrase we know 
the discussion will be intolerable for its unmanliness as well as 
for its unchristianness. It must have been the happy invention 
of that " distinguished divine," the Rev. Cream Cheese, who 
surely by this time, if he is alive, has spoken in many of our 
meetings and must be a D.D. at least. 

There are large numbers of people, in our large cities espe- 
cially, who do not attend church. They are rich people, many 
of them, and still more of them are working people. They are 
possibly an increasing class; we do not know. Setting aside 
cant and snobbery, the rich people who do not attend worship 
of any kind are more in proportion than the working people, 
and to any but a mercantile morality appear the most dangerous ; 
for your rich man keeps his servants, his coachman and grooms, 
his club waiters, and the like, away from worship as well as 
himself. 

But in considering how those who recognize no religious 
obligations and are living without God in the world may be 
brought into the circle of religious influence, we are to remem- 
ber that for the well-to-do it is a matter of choice. Their time 
is their own ; they can come to church if they will. 

To large numbers of working-men such coming is impossible. 
We may just as well rid ourselves of cant and face the fact: 



"How Shall We Reach the Masses?' 7 197 

which those who are rich and desire to get richer, whether in 
or out of our churches, have brought about. 

Among those who cannot attend church are the drivers and 
conductors of street-cars. This is a matter concerning all the 
stockholders, many of whom, we suppose, will kneel at holy 
communion next opportunity. 

Again, policemen. We suppose the policemen are some of 
the masses that it would be well to reach, but, unless as they 
stand at church doors at fashionable weddings or funerals, we 
fear are not in a way to be "reached " at present. 

Then, again, are all that army employed to run engines and 
work trains on Sunday. Evidently they are debarred church 
attendance. 

Also the large number of laborers engaged in laying gas-pipes 
on Sundays or employed in the works. To them add the res- 
taurant and hotel workers, the men employed on Sundays to 
carry excursion parties on steamboats, and the army employed 
in singing, playing on musical instruments, carrying refreshments, 
and the like, — occupied, that is, in amusing those who must be 
amused, — and we arrive at a vast aggregate of working people 
whom our social needs and habits bar out of our churches. 

And these people are largely barred out, it must be remem- 
bered, by those whom at missionary meetings we do not call 
the masses. It is the class who have money to spend, who have 
means to employ other men's time, who are stockholders in this 
or that enterprise, who have shut this large percentage of the 
population out of public worship. Some of them will give the 
earnest laborer desirous to reach the masses ten or even a hun- 
dred dollars for the purpose, and be duly praised therefor. 

Of the non-church-going rich, it may be safely assumed, as a 
rule, that they are evil livers. There are exceptions, but this is 
the rule. They are men who have no regard for public opinion, 
whose money has been procured in questionable ways, whose 
business is more or less disreputable, or whose private lives are 
lawless and an outrage on the common domestic moralities. In 



198 "How Shall We Reach the Masses?" 

all our large cities this class is a numerous one ; in New York 
it is of course a very large class* Sometimes the men of this 
class are cultivated and are ranked by the social code among 
gentlemen ; but the larger class is composed of fortunate specu- 
lators, of lucky gamblers in some of the legally allowable ways 
of gambling, of fraudulent managers of companies, of members 
of knavish "rings," of men who have elevated themselves by 
more or less knavery and impudence from the ranks of the 
masses who earn an honest living by honest toil. They are 
generally coarse, uncultured, egotistical, blustering men, and are 
in the habit of coarse sin and vicious indulgence, as being the 
most natural way for them to spend their own or other men's 
money. 

There have been a number of such lives revealed to us lately 
in the courts, and especially over contested-will cases. Indeed, 
the instances are occurring daily, and may give us some notion 
of the prevalence of this sort of life among a certain class of the 
hastily rich. 

Of the non-church-going working people no such things can 
be said. 

The mass of them are not immoral and not dishonest. If 
we are to go on to do any good to them or any successful work 
among them, we must rid ourselves of the notion that they are 
wicked people or dangerous people. 

Apart from religious principle there is no preservative of 
morality like daily need and daily labor. Many a man whose 
life has been a seed-bed of evil, who has corrupted, demoralized, 
and cursed others, besides cursing his own wretched soul, would 
have lived a sober, decent life with wife and children if he had 
continued working at his honest handicraft, and had not become 
a "great banker" or a "great financier." 

No ; the notion that the working classes, whom our civiliza- 
tion is more and more shutting out of our churches in the cities, 
are dangerous classes or depraved and ignorant classes, threat- 
ening the peace of the community, and that all our anxiety is 



"How Shall We Reach the Masses?" 199 

to be about them on this account, is one we are sorry to see 
cropping out in the discussion of the question at the head of this 
paper. It shows us the dilettantism and unreality which enters 
into so much well-meaning effort, the delusion that even some 
Christian people, including clergymen, allow to be put upon 
them, that wealth and respectability are synonymous, that sin 
does not live in brownstone fronts, nor degradation, deprav- 
ity, and corruption in drawing-rooms furnished by Pottier & 
Stymus. 

If we are to look after the " dangerous classes " in this coun- 
try, the classes who threaten the stability or the well-being of 
our social and domestic order, we shall not find them at the 
workman's bench or laying bricks or carrying mortar ; we shall 
find them among those who, brought up often by honest, hard- 
working fathers and mothers, and taught to read and write in 
our common schools, have developed the skill, impudence, 
energy, good fortune, or unscrupulous knavery to rise out of 
their natural place, and, broken loose from Puritan strictness, 
are taking the coarse enjoyments out of life, which alone appeal 
to a coarse, uncultured nature. 

And when they get into churches, as they sometimes do, and 
become for their money's sake "prominent" there, they are in 
the very way to corrupt and be dangerous to the utmost. The 
coarse knave of Dr. Holland's " Sevenoaks," Colonel Belcher, 
who "pined for a theological seminary," is, as all New-Yorkers 
know, scarce a caricature. 

" In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," was a 
blessing as well as a curse, and the men who become suddenly 
rich, although it may be honestly for a rarity, are the most 
dangerous class, as things go, in the community. They have 
not risen, as a rule, to any sense of the responsibility of wealth, 
and are mostly coarse, boastful, selfish, and, out of their special 
way of making money, ignorant and conceited. They are apt 
to have a contempt for all law, as for all gentleness, unlimited 
faith in impudence and cunning, and a greed to enjoy what 



200 "How Shall We Reach the Masses?" 

early poverty and the strictness of some New England stony 
farm forbade to their obscure innocence. 

But as to the masses of the eager missionary and philanthropist 
— the working-men, that is — what shall we say? The answer 
of a noted evangelist in his vernacular slang was, " Go for 
them!" 

We will give what is, in our judgment, the only way to " reach " 
them. 

First of all, do not confuse the subject, get down in the mud 
before money-bags, and insult the working-man by talking as if 
he were a heathen, an escaped convict, a tramp, or a " danger- 
ous class." 

He is quite as safe in not going to church as the rich man 
who lives next door to one of the most fashionable. 

Secondly, leave him alone for a while and set to work to make 
Christians of the people who do come to church. There is 
nothing that teaches like example, and as long as our churches 
are filled with men who attend regularly and are yet none the 
better for it (but the worse), who never come to baptism, con- 
firmation, or communion, who are engaged in questionable 
schemes of business, whose private lives are corrupt and cor- 
rupting, who will use, as has been done, the organ-loft for the 
purpose of such corruption ; as long as our churches are at- 
tended regularly by vain, frivolous, " fashionable " women ; and 
as long as all this is glossed and excused because these people 
are well-to-do and are not masses, so long, do we think, the 
sensible working-man will conclude to save the price of his 
pew-rent. 

More and more, year by year, the Church has allowed herself 
to be invaded by the world when the world has money ; more 
and more she has herself become a worshiper, apparently, of 
coarse success and money, no matter how got ; and now she 
turns and weeps sentimentally over the condition of the masses, 
the body of working people, among whom dwells whatever of 
stalwart manhood remains among us, whom she has alienated 



"How Shall We Reach the Masses!" 201 

by her fawning to wealth, and to whom the very phrases in 
which her interest is expressed are insulting. 

If we are speaking home and hard words here, it is because 
they need speaking. 

The best way, the only way, indeed, to " reach the masses " 
is to purge our churches, to convert the godless occupants of 
our pews, to put the Church above the world's worship of suc- 
cess and money, to make fact somewhat nearer theory. 

And we may be sure that, unless we do this, the question we 
are asking the empty air, "How shall we reach the masses? " 
will become a more and more ludicrous question to the men who 
do what is fast ceasing in this country to be "respectable," 
namely, earn their daily bread by their daily labor. 



FRANKENSTEIN. 

THERE are some strange outcomes in our civilization — por- 
tents and forms of fear, which forbode, to the thoughtful 
mind, wrath and woe in the future. In what shape that wrath 
and woe may come no man can tell, but one thing any man 
with eyes can tell, namely, that we are heaping up some shape 
of both very busily. 

Man himself, the creature with a body and (under pardon of 
the "scientific " folk) a soul, with loves and hatreds, with affec- 
tions and fears, with a body to be fed and covered and a soul 
and heart to be trained and provided for — man we can in some 
sort understand, as we can the other things and beings which 
God makes ; but the things which man makes, what shall we say 
about them? 

It used to be supposed that the business of the state and the 
Church was about this creature of God, man ; that both existed 
to look after his welfare and care for his destiny. The end of 
both was the salvation, temporal or eternal, of the creature man. 
But man being made, as the Scriptures say and as was commonly 
believed till Mr. Darwin enlightened us, " in the image of God," 
has, as a part of that image and likeness, the power of creating. 
God being a Creator and man made in God's likeness, man is 
a finite creator as God is an infinite. It is a part of man's na- 
ture, therefore, to make things ; but being an imperfect being, 
his creations are not always, as God's are, good. 

Among other things which he has made is the " corporation." 
It may be railroad, life-insurance, mining, manufacturing, or 

(202) 



Frankenstein. 203 

what not, corporation. It is an artificial creation, a thing of 
human manufacture, and is well called "corporation," from the 
Latin word corpus, which means " body," because it has no soul. 

So far man can go in the things he creates. He can make 
bodies ; but the breath of life, by which bodies become living 
souls, he cannot breathe into them. They remain, therefore, 
"corporations" — organized things without souls, consequently 
without consciences, without any sense of right, justice, or 
mercy, without any human feeling. 

The value and use of corporations in organizing men together 
to do what they could not so well, if at all, do alone — in com- 
bining their capital and labor for some great end — are seen and 
confessed. Because of such use and value they have been 
created. The State makes them at its will and confers on them 
what powers it pleases. But they are machines; they are as 
dumb and blind as any other machines, and as brutal in their 
mere force. Their excuse for being is their use to the com- 
munity. In themselves they are neither comely nor pleasant ; 
blind, beastly, and misshapen monsters, they are not fair to look 
upon, except as their clumsy hands are working for the good of 
many men. 

In a land like ours, where nature waits to be subdued by 
men, it was natural that we should call in the aid of these gi- 
gantic creatures. The corporation has become an element of 
American civilization in a degree unknown any other where. 
It has become a superstition among us that we can do nothing 
without a corporation. 

Before we preach the Gospel we must get a corporation to 
"hold " the Bible and Prayer-book. We do not found a school 
by first establishing the school and getting together proper 
teachers and sufficient scholars ; we first make a corporation ; 
the charter from the legislature is the preliminary. If we will 
take care of an orphan or feed a starving beggar, we manufac- 
ture a corporation to do the business. 

Our corporations have accepted the situation. As they are 



204 Frankenstein. 

the perfect flower of our civilization, they are putting on airs 
accordingly. Since the living man with brain and heart and joy 
and sorrow in him, and eternity before him, is nothing, and the 
corporation everything, in the way of force, and since force is 
the idol of our veneration, the corporation is claiming a place 
which amounts in some respects to the expulsion of its makers. 

If one man out of pure wantonness kills another, we in some 
few places still hang him, in nearly every place yet we do or say 
something to make his life unpleasant to him for a while at least. 
But a corporation can kill one hundred or five hundred at a 
stroke, and we accept it as a dispensation of Providence. 

If a man steal simply as a man, in his capacity of individual 
thief, we generally send a policeman after him and worry him 
w r ith indictments, trials, prosecuting attorneys, juries, judges, 
and the like, sometimes for months, and if he has not stolen 
much we frequently shut him up in the penitentiary and make 
it unpleasant for him for several years, unless the governor 
pardon him. But if a corporation steal from half the widows 
and orphans in the community, or if a man steal as a part of 
the corporation, as secretary, treasurer, president, or something 
of that sort, we take it as according to the law of nature ; or if 
any interfering judge or prosecutor meddles in the matter, the 
corporation laughs in his face. 

If an unprotected individual should undertake to buy up a 
legislature or bribe a Senator, we visit him with swift condem- 
nation ; but a corporation can own a whole State, or buy an 
entire Congress, or purchase a score of judges, and these are 
taken for legitimate assets, and the purchase for a business 
transaction. 

Having no soul, the corporation is not expected to act as if 
it had ; and being a creation of law, it is only asked to manage, 
in one way or other, to have the law upon its side. 

The corporation, in the pride of the submissive homage ren- 
dered it on all hands, has forgotten that it exists only for the 
use of the community, that it is a machine made by man to 



Frankenstein. 205 

serve him. The creature has turned upon its creator, and in its 
monstrous and brutal fashion insists that it is lovely and desir- 
able for its own sake and that men are to give way when it 
commands. 

To-day more than one American community, and in more 
than one fashion, is ridden over and trampled upon by this mon- 
strous creation of our civilization. Freed from all trammels 
of conscience, admitting no law of right, confessing no obliga- 
tions and disclaiming all duties, heartless and soulless, this 
creature tramples on every individual right, laughs at law and 
penalty, and defies God and man. 

It buys up the press. " The palladium of our liberties " puffs 
and mutters as the monster permits. It puts a court in its 
pocket and makes the judge and the jury talk the talk that 
pleases it. It will not hesitate, when need is, to buy an entire 
Congress or aspire to the purchase of an entire country. It 
laughs in the face of a community it outrages, and grows more 
monstrous on its complaints and sufferings. 

It is secure from punishment in this world, having become 
too large to be handled by the men that made it, and is secure 
from punishment in the other, because, being a creature of man's, 
and not of God's, making, it has no soul. 

What shall be done with this portent? The history of cor- 
porations for some few years back in this country is a history 
of lying, knavery, bribery, corruption, recklessness of human 
duty, human welfare, and human life. The creature has the 
cunning of the fox and the savage greed of the wolf. It has 
insisted on its own moralities, on making courts, lawmakers, and 
the community accept its ethics. It has rotted the moral sense 
of the public, and in the pride of its sheer brute strength has 
brutalized the thoughts of thousands and made a large part of 
American business only stealing, gambling, perjury, and bribery. 

The man who as a man has some sense of right, some touch 
of humanity and mercy, as a part of one of these monsters takes 
leave of such weakness. He surrenders his conscience at the 



206 Frankenstein. 

bidding of the creature that has become his master. " A mem- 
ber of a corporation," he will do things that as plain John Smith 
he would not dare to do and ever hold his head up again among 
men. 

The apathy with which the public crouches at the feet of 
these creatures of its own making is perhaps the strangest thing 
about the business. Your free American allows himself to be 
kicked, cuffed, snubbed, and insulted by a thing he helped to 
make, whose whole power depends on his will and the will of 
others who are kicked and cuffed like himself. He stands 
serenely smiling while this creature picks his pocket and laughs 
in his face, thankful, apparently, to get off with the coat on his 
back. 

The smallest little street-railroad, that spoils his streets, dis- 
figures his avenues, and is a nuisance passing his door, is his 
tyrannous master, to whom when he pays his money he bows 
and cringes for permission to sit on a filthy seat or hang by a 
filthy strap among wretches by the dozen like himself. And 
the huge railroad, whose president is "a railroad king" — why, 
he positively esteems it a privilege not to be kicked off its cars 
at the first station by a brakeman, and allows himself to be 
swindled every mile with serene contentment, if only the gentle- 
men who stole the road and bought the legislature or the Con- 
gress will kindly let him and his family ride! 

It is possible there must be tyranny in all countries. It may 
be merely a choice of tyrants. The rulers, as recent develop- 
ments have shown, of this country are corporations. They are 
rapidly accumulating enormous wealth. With wealth comes, in 
such a country as this, influence. The function of government 
is fast becoming the wording of their will. 

We have no objection to wealth or influence per se. But 
both, to be safe for others, must be under the control of con- 
science and reason. The danger, under the autocracy of cor- 
porations, lies in this : that the corporation has no conscience, 
no heart, no soul ; that it is an artificial monster with nothing in 



Frankenstein. 207 

it but force t and force, unrestrained by conscience or principle, 
is diabolical. 

Herein lies, to our thinking, one of the most portentous out- 
looks for our future. Under all the forms of freedom we are 
drifting into the most brutal of despotisms — a despotism that is 
one of simple savage power. Of this despotism our legislatures 
and courts have become, in many cases, the hired tools. The 
men who manage it have, in many cases, won splendid successes, 
as reckless gamblers now and then do. And as we worship 
success, the career of these men has corrupted the business circles 
of the country far and wide. 

There is nothing now more obstinately in the way of the fair 
civilization of this country, nothing more in the way of its con- 
sistent Christianization, than the tyranny it lies under to these 
monstrous growths of our materialism, — the corporations of the 
land, — which are propagating brutality, knavery, bribery, and 
thievery, and all the rest of the diabolic ethics of force working 
without obligation and without conscience. 



THE QUADRENNIAL SPASM 

r "PHE fourth year in the nation's calendar is always a year 
1 of which thoughtful and sober-minded Americans are 
ashamed. 

We have State, county, and municipal elections, more or less, 
every year, and they are conducted generally in a way to make 
one blush for his country and his kind. But on the fourth year 
comes the universal clatter, bellow, and blare, for in that year 
the country is in agony about the next President. 

The newspapers, which have showed during the three years 
preceding some faint glimpsings of sense occasionally, now turn 
idiotic in a mass. Bosh, drivel, and lies are the food they offer 
an "intelligent public" for some months continuously. It is 
" the eve of a presidential election," and they have no room for 
anything else. There is generally nothing to choose between 
one side and the other. With perfect truth each can tell about 

" The slaver and slang of the other side." 

The sort of stuff which their conductors imagine will influence 
"intelligent voters " is an insult to any people that claims to be 
semicivilized. Indeed, take any one of our leading political 
papers to-morrow, and look at what it lays before its readers as 
arguments for its own side and against the other, and confess 
that no hostile European opinion of the American people was 
ever so low as the opinion which must be entertained and is 
virtually expressed by our own political press. 
' Than the political newspaper there is only one grosser insult 

(208) 



The Quadrennial Spasm. 209 

offered to the American people in a presidential campaign, and 
that is the stump speech. 

A number of gentlemen with more or less power of lungs, who 
are nerved by the desire to retain offices they now hold or to 
get others in the future, go about the country making speeches 
for one or the other of the rival candidates. The stuff of which 
they are delivered is beneath contempt ; they know it is them- 
selves — some of them at least. When not delivering such 
speeches many of them are intelligent gentlemen, tolerably edu- 
cated, with some reading and some power of reflection. The 
moment they take the stump they cast sense and moderation, 
reason and truth, to the winds. They are trying to " influence 
the masses," and the opinion they entertain of the masses is 
seen in the style of talk they hold with them. There is no sight 
more pitiful than the bellowing gentleman Senator or Congress- 
man on the stump in a presidential canvass ; none more morti- 
fying to a man proud of his country than he and the crowd 
about him — the speech, the cheers, the flags, the brass band, 
the measureless idiocy of the whole performance. The good 
sense and the good name of the nation are insulted and trampled 
upon, and, on the side of the speaker, often knowingly. His 
opinion could not be plainer if he prefaced each senseless yell 
for " our side " with the remark, " You are all a pack of fools." 

We are once more (1872) in the middle of one of these na- 
tional quadrennial fits. 

In some respects it is disgracefully worse than any that has 
preceded it. Hitherto the weapons of these stupid contests 
have been only the tongue and the pen, but the advance of art 
has now given us the pencil and the graver. The illustrated 
papers have entered the field, and the picture can be meaner, 
fouler, and falser than the pen or the tongue dare be. At the 
same time it is a weapon far more effective, for the voter who 
cannot read or cannot reason can usually see the weighty argu- 
ment of the picture. The demagogue has such a high opinion 
of the voting intelligence of his "enlightened fellow-citizens" 



210 The Quadrennial Spasm. 

that he will convince them by a caricature; and having as low 
an opinion of their decency as of their intelligence, he will make 
his caricature blasphemous. There are no words capable of 
expressing the outrage on decency and common Christian feeling 
perpetrated in one of these illustrated papers in a caricature of 
the temptation on the mountain, and in another, on the opposite 
side, in a caricature of the passage of the Red Sea. There seems 
to be nothing in a presidential campaign sacred from the sense- 
less vulgarity and foulness of a partizan press. 

What shall be done about it? How long shall every sober 
and intelligent citizen blush for his country? How long shall 
stupidity, falsehood, and vulgarity run rampant every fourth year, 
to the disgrace of a country that claims to be the foremost in 
the march of humanity? 

There is, in one view, no sight more sublime than that of a 
great people calmly, carefully, and cautiously electing its fittest 
man and putting him at its head to rule and guide it. Ideally 
it is the grandest exercise of national conviction and national 
will. One would suppose it would be done soberly, rationally, 
and with due sense of its importance. Wherever else we might 
find mere bluster and bellow, one would expect not to find them 
in this national crisis, certainly not to find intelligent people, 
who on other subjects can read, write, and reason, taking leave 
of their intelligence and putting their faith in this matter in 
humbug, brass, and lies. 

" But the people are not intelligent. The people are influenced 
by noise and bluster, gulled by falsehood and led by tricks, 
cheated by pictures and banners, processions and cannon-firing, 
and influenced by stump orators. What would you have? We 
must take things as we find them." 

That this is the real opinion, though they dare not express it, 
of the demagogues who conduct ." campaigns," there is no 
question ; that the opinion is as untrue as it is insulting, we 
honestly believe ; that large and increasing masses of the people 
are disgusted with the style of campaigning the demagogues 



The Quadrennial Spasm. 211 

patronize, we believe also. But even were it as true as the 
demagogues assume, it would take nothing from the infamy and 
shame of their action. 

For nothing educates a people like a free and intense political 
life. It is their right to be approached on political affairs with 
reason and truth. The demagogue who approaches them with 
nonsense and falsehood insults them and degrades them ; he 
really despises the " voting cattle " he leads, and is at heart a 
traitor to the institutions he pretends to love. Every act of 
national sovereignty and choice should be a lesson in political 
knowledge to a free people. Issues should be discussed calmly, 
rationally, without personalities, and seriously, as they deserve. 
The good sense, the real patriotism, and the sound judgment of 
the people should be appealed to. This all good men confess. 

So much the more do we blame men who, either through the 
press or from the stump, assume that the people of this land are 
ignorant, debauched, and indecent, and who approach them 
with talk, writing, or pictures which flatly put forth that assump- 
tion and are an insult to the people, as they are a disgrace to 
the country. 

We believe, as it is always darkest just before dawn, so this 
present presidential canvass, the vilest in its personalities, the 
most senseless in its gabble, and the most indecent in its con- 
duct that the country has yet seen, is the end of the old methods. 
Allow us at least to hope so. The matter, after all, is in the 
hands of the intelligence and decency of the country. People 
can, if they will, take this business out of the hands of the dis- 
reputable fellows who "run politics," and insist that a parcel of 
men without character or responsibility, and a set of newspapers 
without principle, shall not periodically make the face of every 
American citizen burn for shame at the unspeakable disgrace 
done to his country and to the cause of free institutions every- 
where. 

For ourselves, faith in the people is a foundation article of 
our creed. We do not believe them either stupid, besotted, or 



212 The Quadrennial Spasm. 

unprincipled. We believe the land is safe, under God, in their 
hands. As a matter of fact, it makes no special difference 
whom they choose to put in the highest places. So healthy and 
strong and true is the national life that it can stand almost any 
kind of President, Congressman, or Senator, and not know it is 
hurt. That is the only explanation of our national existence 
to-day. 

So much the more, therefore, are we indignant at a press and 
a demagogy that make a trade of patriotism for approaching 
such a people as if they were no whit wiser, no whit loftier- 
thoughted or more steadfast of heart, than a Paris mob, the tools 
of Louis Napoleon one day and cf la commune the next. 

The great, calm, long-suffering, patient American people, 
owning the land it lives on, with hostages given to fortune and 
pledges to heaven in every household over the broad land — is 
this the people, gentlemen politicians, to insult with your press 
and stump "blatherskite," your blasphemous caricatures, and 
your lying personalities? 

Has the time not nearly come, think you, when they will ap- 
preciate the grossness of the insults you stupidly put upon them 
periodically in your " campaigns," when they will awake to your 
coarseness and insolence and demand that you and unsavory 
carrion-kites of your kind shall go to your own places? 



PARROTS AND PHRASES. 

SPEAKING of a book lately published, a reviewer writes : 
" They [the essays] are bright, straightforward, and telling, 
as Western writing and talking very often is." 

We shall not stop to correct the grammar of this sentence 
from an Eastern quarterly, but take it with its sin upon its head 
as a text for a few words on the delusive power of phrases. 

What does it mean? Does the writer intend to say that 
''bright, straightforward, and telling" writing and speaking are 
in any way a peculiar Western growth? that they are indige- 
nous? that they come in the West by nature? that a man who 
would be dull, involved, and inefficient as a writer or speaker in 
New York has only to remove to Chicago to find himself at 
once the reverse of all these? 

Unless the writer means something of this sort, he means 
nothing. 

As a fact, we believe he does mean nothing; he is merely 
using a phrase, and uses it without any idea of a meaning. 
Thousands of people do so. They get a formula and they ima- 
gine they have got a thing. They find something with which 
they are unacquainted ; they do not know what to make of it. 
Suddenly a happy thought comes into their bewildered brains : 
they have got a phrase by the tail (and what need of an idea?), 
and the phrase explains everything ; they never pause to inquire 
whether the phrase is not nonsense. 

A gentleman finds a book of "bright, straightforward," etc.,' 
writing. There is something in the style to which he is unac- 

(213) 



214 Parrots and Phrases. 

customed ; he does not know what to make of it ; but suddenly 
it occurs to him that the book was written by a man who lived 
some time in the West. He has his phrase. The book is 
" Western." The word " Western " accounts to him for all 
peculiarities. 

Or a clergyman preaches a sermon. He has his own way of 
doing it ; it is not the way to which the venerable Mr. or Mrs. 
Blank has been accustomed. What shall they say about it? 
They need a phrase ; they ache for a word of sense or nonsense ; 
so it occurs to one of them that the preacher was in the South 
a few years, or in the West, or in New England. The phrase 
is found. " His style is too Western " or " too Southern " or 
" too Eastern," as the case may be, and the wise old gentleman 
or old lady has exhausted the subject and explained everything. 

Years ago in England the reviewers invented a phrase, " the 
Lake School," and honestly went on with their nonsensical 
phrase, repeating it as parrots would, and applying it to men 
as widely different as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Southey and 
Lamb. They talked this babble for years. 

The imitation of it, as quoted above, will be talked as long, 
perhaps, but not without protest against its stupidity. 

Are there no " bright, straightforward," or effective writers 
or speakers in the East? does the West monopolize them all? 
What is meant by " Western style " or " Western oratory " or 
"Western preaching"? Can anybody tell us the supposed 
meaning that lurks under these parrot phrases? 

Just consider. The entire " West " has been peopled in a 
lifetime. The great mass of speaking and writing men in the 
West were educated in the East. The leaders in all enterprises 
in the West are men from the East. And yet the eloquence of 
one distinguished Western Senator has been called, within a 
week, in our hearing " Western eloquence," and its vigor, clash, 
and brilliancy accounted for by that phrase. And this Senator 
was educated in Boston and came to the West a man of thirty. 

We have seen a like phrase, " Western originality," etc., ap- 



Parrots and Phrases. 215 

plied to the writing of a distinguished professor of divinity at 
Nashotah, a man born and educated in Europe, graduated at 
one of its famous universities, and in theology at the General 
Seminary in New York. 

Graduates of Harvard or Yale, of Columbia, Dublin, Leipsic, 
or Jena, owe, it seems, when they talk or write, all their peculiar 
power or personal gifts to the fact that they are living in the 
West ; and whenever we criticize them and praise, the accepted 
formula is " Western brightness " or " Western straightforward- 
ness," and when we blame, " Western lack of culture," " Western 
roughness." 

We submit that it is about time this sort of parrot chatter 
were ended. Brightness and straightforwardness belong to no 
section. Rudeness and lack of culture are found everywhere — 
vastly more in the East proportionally than in the West, inas- 
much as the better portion of our foreign immigration and a 
large share of the most bright, cultured, and enterprising of our 
home youth have made, and continue to make, the population 
of the West. 

The people of the West were all Eastern people originally, 
and in the newest West within a score of years. They are 
brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters of those who dwell in the 
old nests, generally the flower of the flock, too, those to whom 
the best advantages of education and independence had been 
given. Their education is Eastern education, their culture East- 
ern culture, their manners and their language the language and 
the manners learned at home. Chicago is only a bit of Man- 
hattan Island planted on the shore of Michigan ; Cleveland only 
a larger and broader New Haven, elms and all, shining across 
the fresh waves of Erie instead of the salt waters of the Sound. 

A book may be "bright, straightforward, and telling"; it is 
not therefore a Western book. Saying " Western " does not 
explain its brightness or the rest. 

And a book may be dull, roundabout, and good for nothing ; 
it is not therefore Eastern. Saying " Eastern " does not account 



216 Parrots and Phrases. 

for the book's stupidity. (Western critics should remember this.) 
There are bright books written in the East, and stupid books 
written in the West. There are cultivated, eloquent, and bril- 
liant speakers in the West ; there are the same sort of speakers in 
the East. There are coarse, uncultivated people East and West 
alike, and stupid people in both sections in too great abundance. 

We protest against the use of empty phrases, which propagate 
false conceptions and misunderstandings between brethren of 
the same household. If critics are too lazy or too dull to criti- 
cize, we beg they will not cloak their laziness or dullness by 
parrot formulas which mean nothing, and which, as far as they 
effect anything, do harm. 

We have met people who actually seem to imagine that the 
man of Chicago is a rude, trampling, loud-talking savage — the 
man of Chicago who ten years ago was doing business on 
Broadway. 

We have met others who talked as if the man of San Fran- 
cisco was a half-Spanish, half-Mexican barbarian — he having 
graduated at Harvard and practised law in Boston within six 
years past. 

We ask the critics whether it is worth their while to go on 
with a shallow twaddle which confirms the ignorant in such 
absurdities, and which to sensible people has no meaning at all? 



A DUTY SHIRKED. 

WE have received several letters lately from brother clergy- 
men, in which, incidentally or formally, they complain of 
the lack of consideration in the laity — wardens and vestrymen, 
notably — in providing for the support of the ministry. Salaries 
are ridiculously small or they are not paid promptly. The 
clergyman is allowed to go on for months and years, struggling 
with poverty, want, and disappointment. His energy is de- 
stroyed ; his elasticity of mind is gone. He is anxious to find 
bread and butter for his family, and that pressing anxiety ab- 
sorbs his thought. The color is washed out of his life ; he is 
a prematurely broken-down old man ; and this, too, among a 
people where his work is prospering, where he is useful, honored, 
and even loved. 

There are cases of this kind, to our knowledge, in scores. 
Able men— zealous, active, successful laborers — are allowed to 
lie in the Slough of Despond, under a load of anxiety and poverty, 
by the pure thoughtlessness and carelessness of a people who 
honor and even love them, who would be very sorry indeed to 
part from them. And these men for their work's sake toil on 
in this hopeless and sad way, year in and out, and make no 
sign. 

It is indeed something to complain of, and bitterly ; but at 
the same time we express our honest opinion when we say this 
is a matter where the fault lies entirely with the sufferers them- 
selves ; they shirk a plain duty. 

(217) 



218 A Duty Shirked. 

We look back with a good deal of quiet amusement to our 
own first experience. We were sent to a thriving town, where 
the people welcomed us gladly. The parish was a growing 
one ; it had outgrown its church building and worshiped mean- 
while in a public hall, renting the little chapel (which had, of 
course, never been consecrated) as a school-house. It expected 
to build soon and had already a flourishing subscription for the 
purpose. 

Under our charge the congregation increased. There were 
a number of adult baptisms, quite a number confirmed, and we 
had the best reasons for believing that we had the personal re- 
gard, and even affection, of the mass of the people. 

The little chapel mentioned was rented for twelve dollars a 
month. The net rent was ten dollars. This was paid over by 
the treasurer to ourself, the "rector elect," with commendable 
promptness, on the ist of every month; and this was all we 
heard from the parish and the vestry in a money way for twelve 
months. It came within about eighty dollars of paying our 
board. This thriving congregation in a thriving Western city 
had the Gospel preached one year without costing it a cent. 

Whose fault was it ? Ours, of course. We were very young 
and very modest ; we never opened our lips on the subject. 
When we resigned at the end of twelve months the good people 
expressed great sorrow and astonishment at our leaving " a field 
of so much usefulness," where our ministry was "so greatly 
blessed." We never even enlightened them or our bishop on 
the cause ; we could not bring ourselves to speak of money or 
our own wants in connection with our duty ; but meanwhile it 
was hardly fair to expect the father at home to be paying the 
board of his grown-up eldest, and so we "resigned." 

Again we say, it was our own fault ; we can see that clearly 
enough now ; we wronged ourself and wronged the people ; we 
kept back a part of the truth of the Gospel. 

And this is precisely what scores of our brethren are doing 
from a mistaken delicacy like our own. They do not speak out 



A Duty Shirked. 219 

the whole message to the people ; they do not tell them their 
plain duty. 

And the people are busy, occupied with their own outdoor 
work, especially in the West. They do not think, that is all ; it 
does not occur to them to inquire about their pastor's wants. 
We may say it ought to, but we are taking things as they are ; 
and, as a matter of fact, it does not occur to them often to con- 
sider anybody's business but their own. They are ready enough 
if they once think of it — liberal enough and able enough; but 
they simply do not think. 

Now here comes in the pastor's duty. He is there to teach 
them what they ought to do — to bring forgotten duties to re- 
membrance, to see that they neglect nothing. 

The duty of supporting the Gospel ministry is about as clear 
a duty as the Gospel reveals. What right has the pastor to give 
that duty the go-by? If it is an irksome thing to preach it, 
because of his own sensitiveness and delicacy, so much the more 
is he bound not to let it slip. Personal considerations, in this 
as in all cases, should be put out of sight. The preacher is 
not to shun to declare the whole counsel of God. He has no 
right to proclaim a mutilated Gospel. He is doing grievous 
wrong to be dumb on a plain, straightforward duty out of mor- 
bid delicacy or weak regard for his own sensitiveness. 

And we say here that hundreds of our clergy are utterly un- 
faithful in this very matter. They do not preach the whole 
truth ; they are temporizing with an evil and compromising with 
a wrong; they let people rob God and rob men out of sheer 
cowardice ; they make an idol of their morbid refinement. 

The matter goes beyond the suffering of this or that clergy- 
man ; it goes to the very root of Christian duty and life. Our 
people are asleep over a grievous wrong and sin all over the 
land ; starved in soul, narrow-hearted and narrow-thoughted ; 
ignorant of the work and its needs, ignorant of its means and 
ends ; doling out pittances to their own parish, and meaner 
pittances still to any good work beyond ; living in luxury and 



220 A Duty Shirked. 

extravagance, flaunting vanity and self-indulgence; and, we 
honestly and sadly say it, all because the Church clergyman is 
such a sensitive and highly organized, proud gentleman that he 
fears that to preach the plain God's truth to these people will 
compromise his dignity or lower his self-respect! 

There are no clergy in the world more poorly supported than 
our own. And who shall say they do not deserve it, for their 
hiding of a plain truth? If it were a merely personal matter, 
they might still do so, and pay the penalty ; but it is not a per- 
sonal matter. They and their families do not pay the penalty. 
The wrong is done to the Church and to the world — to thou- 
sands far and wide beyond their small circle. The whole Church 
is faithless by their shameful neglect. 

We speak strongly here, and plainly. We confess our own 
cowardice, to begin with. We have shown a specimen of that ; 
but we have improved considerably since that day. 

To the clergy we say: Preach plainly, four times a year at 
least, when the fit texts occur in the Scriptures of the day, the 
plain Gospel duty of giving, and giving freely, for the support 
of the ministry and the Church. Put self out of the question 
in this matter as in all. Do your duty— all of it — honestly and 
with singleness of heart. 

To the laity we say : We have given you here a small revela- 
tion. You will find scores of clergymen suffering, who are too 
sensitive to give you a hint on the subject. Perhaps your own 
rector is one of them. He has not told you your duty, because 
he fears you might misapprehend him, and think he sought yours 
and not you. We trust he will do better hereafter ; but mean- 
while we have no such fear. We tell it you here plainly : see 
that you are not robbing God ; see, too, that you are not robbing 
the laborer who is worthy of his hire. 



BUILDING AND ARMING FORTS. 

A FRIEND mentions in one of his letters the gratifying fact 
that a certain church "has been built by one gentleman 
and endowed by another." 

We are glad to see a spasm of sense coming over our people 
in this matter. 

The building of a church is a good work, and ordinarily a 
congregation may be trusted to keep the church open and sus- 
tain divine service within its walls. And when a congregation 
builds a church for itself it will be pretty certain for a time to 
keep the building open for church uses. 

But there are exceptions even to this ; there are exceptions 
all the time. We have in our mind at this moment two cases 
of late occurrence, where church buildings have been sold 
because there were no rich people close about them to keep 
them open by paying the necessary expenses. The changes of 
the city had left surrounding them a poor and neglected popu- 
lation—a denser population by far than was around them when 
the buildings were erected, but a poor population and one not 
given to church- going. 

In both cases the congregations "pulled up stakes," sold the 
consecrated church and the ground, and packed off " np-town " 
with the proceeds to build another church, where the rich and 
nice people are at present more plentiful. 

Such cases make one feel a little indignant. They rather 
disgusted us at the time. It seemed a very odd proceeding for 
a church to run away from the poor, when we considered who 

(221) 



222 Building and Arming Forts. 

is understood to have founded the Church, and for what he 
founded it, and what he sent it out into this world to do. But 
things get dreadfully mixed in these last days, and there are ex- 
traordinary performances done by churches and vestries, which 
bewilder one's sense of fitness if that sense is at all influenced 
by the New Testament. 

We expressed ourselves about one of the cases to a friend 
from the city where the operation was performed, and, accus- 
tomed as he was to the great city's tone about things in general, 
our astonishment seemed quite uncalled for. He thought the 
performance of selling a church and running away with the 
money, and the Gospel too, as soon as the rich and respectable 
people had moved up-town, was the most natural thing in the 
world to do. The new-comers were not able to sustain the ex- 
penses, it seemed, and there was no choice. 

Our friend put an entirely new face on the thing. He was a 
practical man and looked at the matter in a practical way, and we 
were enlightened by his airy business way of stating the facts. 

It takes, as we learned from him, a certain number of thou- 
sand dollars to sustain a church and keep it open with proper 
services, etc., in New York, let us say. These thousands must 
be raised by the congregation. It is the business of a con- 
gregation to take care of its religious expenses and be "self- 
supporting." But in the lower part of the city tenement-house 
people live ; working-men, laborers, mechanics, and their fami- 
lies, sewing-girls, etc., are the only inhabitants. They are poor 
and, worse, they are careless church-goers ; they will not or can- 
not raise the money to support the Gospel and keep the church 
open and served. The well-to-do people have all gone away ; 
it is inconvenient for them to come so far to church. 

There is nothing left, then, but to close the church, or else to 
utilize it by selling it and building another in a neighborhood 
where people are able to rent pews. 

It is a sad result, but apparently, as our friend thought, in- 
evitable. More and more the enormous mass of untouched 



Building and Arming Forts. 223 

heathenism in the lower part of the city is increasing ; more and 
more congregations are flying upon its advance, pulling down 
the churches, packing up their Prayer-books, and retreating be- 
fore the resistless tide. Now and then they make a rally and 
put a little mission chapel in some alley or on some back street, 
and support a missionary in more or less poverty, as a relief to 
conscience ; but on the whole the attempt is felt to be almost 
hopeless, and the next church prepares itself, with as good a 
grace as possible, to be swept away up-town in its turn. 

There is no security, it appears from what we learned from 
our practical city friend, that any church in a city, no matter 
how solemnly consecrated, will not in due time, as the city 
grows and as its heathenism and poverty as well as its wealth 
increase, be sold for a storehouse or worse. 

To those who build churches as memorials or as a work of 
charity and godliness, and who wish these works to remain, this 
is not in the highest degree encouraging. 

A church building is of no special use without church services, 
and it is the fact that church services cannot be sustained with- 
out some money. We wish they could be. Our bishops would 
like it, and both our missionary boards ; it would make their 
work easy comparatively. We have no doubt our laymen would 
1 ke it too. But the hard fact stands that it cannot be done. 
Coal, gas, sexton's wages, repairs, etc., to say nothing of some 
small support for a clergyman, all require money; and in the 
changes of the years it comes to pass that around the church 
gathers a population which, more than any other, needs the 
church, — needs it all the more because it does not feel the need 
and cares nothing about supplying it, —a population which will 
give nothing as yet to support the ordinances of religion, and 
yet to whom these ordinances are the one means of salvation 
from utter degradation. 

To make the church building useful to this population it must 
have services provided by others, at least in some considerable 
degree. 



224 Building and Arming Forts. 

And here comes in the wisdom of endowing as well as build- 
ing the church ; here comes in the very sensible course pursued 
in the mother Church of England, where no church is conse- 
crated without some small endowment sufficient to secure its 
use and occupancy for divine service, let populations change as 
they may. 

At present, taking facts as we find them, we cannot depend 
on " parishes," as we call them, to keep churches open for their 
holy uses. Our congregations go on the Congregational theory 
that people are to provide the Gospel for themselves. The 
church is theirs, and all its furniture ; it is a provision, better or 
worse, for themselves and their families, and when the interest 
of themselves and families require it they carry it off. It is not 
felt that they owe any obligations to the general community 
which has gathered under the shadow of their church spire. 
That general community may need the Gospel quite as much 
as any community of Chinamen to whom they send missionaries, 
but the American "parish" feels no local responsibility. It 
will keep its church open when it can do so most conveniently 
to the families that compose it, and where the money for ex- 
penses is most readily procured. 

We are not complaining or finding fault ; we are but taking 
existing facts, under which we are all working, and asking what 
is the wisest and most sensible course, the facts being as they 
are. 

And we say we see no practical and sensible way out, except 
to encourage the endowment as well as the building of churches. 

There is certainly no other way for those who wish to make 
a church building a permanent memorial of their faith and 
charity. Having erected it, they must go a step further and 
make it certain, let population and business change as they may, 
that there will be some modest income sufficient to eke out 
deficiencies and thus sustain the ministrations of religion inside 
the consecrated walls when they are surrounded, as they may 
be, by a very poor and needy community —a community which, 



Building axd Arming Forts. 225 

because it is poor and needy and perhaps vicious, has therefore 
special need of the Gospel and its influences. 

We are steadily drifting in this country into the condition of 
all rich and prosperous nations. Our small variations in govern- 
mental forms are proving themselves no barriers against the 
inevitable tendencies of a mercantile civilization — the collection 
of wealth in a few hands, and the increased poverty and de- 
pendence of large and increasing masses of the population. We, 
like other nations, must pay the penalties of modern civilization, 
and they are something our universal suffrage, if it were ex- 
tended to all the children as well as all the women, could neither 
stop nor stay. 

In truth, its tendency, more fully accepted among ourselves 
than among others, is to recognize life as a battle, where each 
man's hand is against his neighbor, and where the weak must 
go to the wall ; to recognize the fact that all must have fair play 
and an even chance, and then succeed or fail, as they may 
make it. 

More rapidly here than anywhere (because here we remove 
all obstacles to the working out of the law of individual free- 
dom in the fight) will the result be reached and the power be in 
the hands of capital. 

It is the business of Christianity to insist that that power shall 
not be a selfish power. The State recognizes it as such alone, 
thinks it wise so to do, leaves wealth free to grasp and grind 
and multiply and gather itself into few hands, if so be, and con- 
siders that wise political economy. 

Doubly strong, then, is the responsibility of religion to insist 
that it is but a trust, that it must be used nobly for the good of 
the many, not merely for the pride or power of the few. 

It is time that this duty was pressed home, that the individu- 
alism of social and business life was met by the strong corporate 
and brotherly life of Christianity, which is its only sufficient 
correction. 

The theory that a man is to provide religious advantages for 



22 G Building and Arming Forts. 

himself, his own family, his own time, is but the individual theory 
introduced into the Church ; it is poisoning her at the very heart. 
An isolated Congregationalism is the most antichristian, because 
the most antibrotherly, thing existing. 

It is a sign of better things that men are building and endow- 
ing churches ; it is a sign that men believe themselves responsible 
for their brethren, responsible for the land and the ages to come. 

We have little faith that anything we can say here will arouse 
Christian men to the danger and the remedy. It must beccme 
more pressing and more patent to the dullest sight first, we fear. 
But it is really time that our imbecile method of fighting the 
devil's kingdom was changed to something more strenuous and 
determined. 

We must begin to plant outposts that shall not be driven in, 
to build fortresses that shall not be dismantled, in one genera- 
tion. Every parsonage-house provided is a step in that direc- 
tion; every school-house built under the shadow of the church 
is another. These things add to the permanence and stability 
of the parish or the church, and give assurance that it can stand 
amid changes. 

It only needs that we begin to see the necessity of putting 
this permanence and stability beyond question by making pro- 
vision in this line still further, and securing by some property 
given, some endowment made over into safe hands, that, even 
should the respectable and well-to-do go and only the poor and 
neglected be left around the church we have helped to build, 
there may yet be for them the ministrations of the Gospel in its 
hallowed walls and a priest to break to them the bread of life. 

Whenever a church is built, it should be put beyond question 
that that ground should never be yielded, that there while time 
lasts the offering of prayer and praise should regularly ascend 
to heaven. 

And setting fine-spun theories aside, and " plans " and " sys- 
tems " for raising revenues, which, unhappily, are only plans and 
systems and never were acted upon in this world, the only direct, 



Building and Arming Forts. 227 

practical, and straightforward way to secure that result is not 
only to build, but endow the church. 

Very early in the history of the Church that method was 
found necessary. It has been found so in all lands hitherto, 
and we do not think that we are about to prove in this country 
any exception to the universal rule. 



RECOVERY. 

WE have said that repentance cannot change the past ; that 
the act done once is done forever ; that no tears can wash 
it out, and that ordinarily no amount of endeavor can stop its 
evil consequences ; that these will go on widening and deepen- 
ing often after the doer is cold in his grave. 

And this is the most terrible experience about sin : that a 
whole life of repentance and amendment cannot make it as if it 
had not been ; that the scars remain to mark the sinner, and 
the deed remains to condemn him, while time lasts at least. 

What shall a man do, then? What can he do? And what 
is the meaning of deliverance? The strong cry of the penitent 
soul is for freedom from the stain as well as the guilt. It is not 
enough that the last go ; the first must go also. Indeed, the 
sense of stain must be bitterer pain to many natures than the 
sense of guilt ; it is somehow nearer and more personal ; it abides 
more permanently ; there is less chance of forgetting it ; it burns 
and blisters all the time. 

Deliverance from the penalty is not deliverance from the 
stain. Though all punishment be foregone, though the wrong- 
doer be assured that there shall be no infliction for his wrong- 
doing, that does not remove this horrible sense of defilement — 
it does not wash out the stain, which pollutes and degrades. 

How shall one be rid of that? How again shall the old 
lost sense of innocence come back? 

Not, surely, by the annihilation of the past ; we see that tha' 
is not possible. Nevertheless, the sense and feeling of innocenc 

(228) 



Recovery. 229 

may be restored, and many, by God's blessing, have found it 
restored. 

The method is not hard, after all, of understanding. 

There is a relation between a man and his acts. It is not 
unchangeable ; it may vary from day to day. The acts, indeed, 
remain the same, but the man may change his position toward 
them by changing himself. He need not remain the same, 
though his past acts do. The mountain does not move, but 
my relation to the mountain may change every moment, because 
I can move. So with a man's completed acts : they are com- 
pleted and remain, but from day to day the man's relation to 
them may be changed, because the man himself may change. 

Sincere repentance, embracing confession, satisfaction, and a 
permanent amendment and a change of life, removes on this 
account not only the guilt, but the stain, in that it puts the man 
into a relation toward his sins entirely different from his old one. 
His position toward them is changed because he is changed 
himself. 

Sorrow is not in itself the measure of repentance. It is not 
necessary that one should dwell upon his sin, and weep over it, 
and make unavailing efforts to wipe it out. The measure of 
true repentance is the degree in which a man gets away from 
his sin and from the possibility of repeating it. His deliverance 
lies in the future, not in the past ; he must look forward, and 
not backward. The hope is that he shall so turn and so live 
that in the time to come, when memory looks back over a 
blackened past, he shall be unable to connect his present self 
with what memory shows him ; that the things which shock and 
shame him shall be things which he can in no way associate 
with his life or feeling. 

On the ruins of the past one may build the palaces of the 
future. Outgrowing sin, temptation, and failure, on his old self, 
changed and penitent, a man by God's grace may build a new 
self which forgets or repudiates the old. He may thus stand 
to-day and look back upon a former life, astonished that it could 



230 Recovery. 

ever have had any connection with him. He sees himself in it 
nowhere. It appears to be another being altogether who is 
living that life and doing those deeds ; there is nothing in either 
akin to him. He has so risen, has been so lifted out of all that 
— placed so far beyond and above it— that it is to him an un- 
known land, which he remembers only as if he had seen it in 
troubled dreams. And when conscience accuses, as it may at 
times, and claims him as guilty of the things his soul abhors, he 
justifies himself before its bar as he is justified before God's. 
He can to himself declare himself innocent. He, being what 
he is, cannot be guilty of the crimes that are impossible to him, 
of sins which such as he, living in the whiteness and warmth of 
God's grace, cannot commit. 

For there can be no recovery from sin which shall merely lift 
one back to the old level. When the soul cries out of the 
depths it must cry for more than a mere help to reach the sur- 
face. If it rise at all, it must, in the nature of things, rise be- 
yond the point from which it fell. The power that lifts it, if it 
be lifted, is a power which will carry it far up. Out of the 
depths must mean up to the white heights ; out of the darkness 
must mean into the light, where there is no shadow ; out of the 
mire must mean away to the clear summits, where the sunlight 
and the moonlight flash and glow forevermore. There is no 
safety in anything short of this. A real recovery from sin means 
a loftier ascent into holiness. They who never fall are they 
alone who never need to rise. 

Among the heroes of holiness the names of wonder are those 
of men who have so risen upon their former selves. From St. 
Paul down, the most bitter opposers have been changed again 
and again into the most dauntless heroes of the faith. From 
St. Mary Magdalene downward, those who have touched the 
pit's bottom have been not unfrequently those who have risen 
to breathe the purest airs of holiness and live the saintliest lives. 
Miracles of God's grace we call them, these lives that have 
been taken from among the hoofs of the swine and set among 



Recovery. 231 

the stars of God. And yet this miracle, like all miracles, is but 
a law of God, reasonable and regular. It is no encouragement 
to sin to say it (" Shall we sin, then, that grace may abound? "), 
yet it is a fact in the nature of men of which God's grace makes 
high uses that he only knows the horror and the shame of sin 
who has himself sinned; that no soul can turn from evil with 
such loathing as the soul that has drunk from the vile fountain ; 
that none will flee so fast and so far from the blackened and 
horrible pit as he who knows all the blackness and all the horror. 
If there be genuine repentance and a true root conversion, it is 
in the nature of things that the chiefest of sinners should become 
the chiefest of saints. 

The mass of ordinary respectable people, whose position ex- 
empts them from strong temptations, whose tempers are equable 
and whose self-control is equal to the small amount of service 
it is called to do, live lives which startle nobody either by their 
wrong-doing or their right. The level on which they live is not 
a high one ; it leads to no self-denial, to no heroism of virtue. 
But it is a respectable enough level ; it does not take them into 
any degradation or any shame. They are full of faults and 
weaknesses, but they do no great sins. They do not shock 
themselves nor shock anybody else. They are always the people 
who are most shocked, however, at any out-of-the-way sin in 
others, and who have the least faith in any possibility of recovery. 
They fail to understand how Christ came with any message for 
publicans and sinners. Their own watery, colorless lives are 
taken as the measure of Christian perfection. To lead men to 
live such lives— neither good nor bad, neither hot nor cold, but 
in all things respectable in the eyes of society — was, they sup- 
pose, the purpose of the Gospel. 

To such lives there is no fall, for there is nothing from which 
to fall except respectability. From such lives the ascent to any 
lofty height is not frequent, as they are supposed to be already 
as high as man can expect or God require. To a man living 
such a life the first change toward anything loftier or nobler is 



232 Recovery. 

often a fall. Overcome by some temptation, shocked out of 
the proprieties, discovering the paper crust on which it was living 
over the abyss, outraged in all its respectabilities, filled with 
loathing and shame— for the first time the soul gets a glimpse of 
the overarching heavens from which it is so far away, as a man 
must descend into a deep well to see the stars at noonday. 

And then, with strong crying and a penitence that goes to 
the roots of being, it may turn to God and seek deliverance 
from the depths of sorrow, sin, and shame in which it lies. But 
in rising out of these its movement is not stopped when it reaches 
the old level. The mighty power of grace that has raised it so 
far is a power that will raise it farther. For this soul there is 
no hope on the old levels — for it no safety at all in the old weak 
defenses. Saved if it be at all, it must be saved by dwelling 
from henceforth on the heights. It knows this and accepts it. 
The fall has made the soul know itself better, and its life better, 
and the weaknesses of the common poor protections, which are 
of use only when no trial comes. It now plants itself .on the 
rocks of faith and knowledge — faith in God and knowledge of 
itself — and accepts holiness as for it henceforth, as for all men, 
the only sure protection against sin. It must go as far up as it 
went down. 

So in God's strange miracles of grace and from the wonderful 
nature of man it comes to pass that the first impulse to a high 
and holy life may come from a moral fall ; that sin may be the 
actual beginning of righteousness, because it first reveals the man 
to himself and tells him his need of righteousness. In the 
highest as well as the most literal sense, Christ came " not to 
call the righteous, but sinners to repentance," and for a man to 
find himself before himself, not in lip profession, but in honest 
knowledge and conviction, a sinner ; confessed and unconcealed, 
is the preparation for hearing the call. " Content to dwell in 
decencies forever," he hears no word from the heavens. Flimsy 
pretenses and concealments all gone, among the publicans, the 
sinners, and the magdalens, condemned by his own conscience 



Recovery. 233 

as well as by God's law, the call of pity and of hope comes to 
his unstopped ears where he lies, and he is saved as a sinner 
who would have been damned as a saint. 

We are walking among mysteries here, and yet all religion is 
a mystery, a moral as well as an intellectual mystery ; and these 
are familiar mysteries, which grow out of our own nature as 
well as out of God's grace. We are generally too timid to 
speak of them, because we fear what even the apostle seemed 
to have felt needed to be warned against, the danger of turning 
" the grace of God into lasciviousness," of making God's grace 
an excuse for man's sin. 

But the mystery is clear enough for our guidance, and melts 
out of mystery into hope and trust. 

Let the sinner who feels the stain of his sin, who knows how 
it burns and eats into his nature, who loathes himself as polluted 
and tainted with the vile pollution and taint of hell, let him take 
heart and hope. The law of recovery is, after all, a plain law 
enough. He can be so changed that there shall be no taint or 
stain. He can become so altered that he can stand up and 
deny, in the power of Christ, the sins that claim him to their 
face, as Christ will deny them for him at the final bar. He can 
say, "Between me — the man I am now — and these vile things 
there is no bond of relation. I am not guilty, and could not be 
guilty, of these. They were done some time, but not by me ; a 
man did them who bore my name and personated me, but that 
man is dead — utterly gone out of life into oblivion, buried out 
of man's sight and God's. And I here am a new man created 
by the Lord Christ, and these foul things when they claim me 
are lying." 

That is the new mail's defense before his own accusing con- 
science, and it justifies him ; it is his defense presented by the 
Lord before God, and God justifies him and challenges earth 
and hell to condemn him. 

That is to say, the stain of sin is utterly washed out, the en- 
tail of sin is utterly cut off and ended, because there is such a 



234 Recovery. 

thing as a new creation possible ; because the guilty and stained 
manhood may be buried, and a new man out of it may be 
created in righteousness and true holiness. Recovery from sin 
is not the amending of manner, not the sorrow for a fault, but 
an actual recreation, so that a man can stand before earth and 
heaven and deny his own past. 



RELIGION AND GODLINESS. 

RELIGION is not godliness. It is not necessarily piety, 
not even honesty, righteousness, cleanliness, or decency. 

A man may be a very religious man, busily engaged about 
religion, careful in the duties of religion, and yet be a very bad 
and vile man. 

" It depends upon the religion " somewhat, but not alto- 
gether. There are religions which are plainly bad, which require 
their devotee to be vile or cruel or lying; so that the more 
religious a man is, the worse he is. There are religions which 
demand impurity, for instance. There are others which conse- 
crate cruelty. In some monastic " religions" dirt was elevated 
into sacredness, and the greatest saint was the man who washed 
himself the least and was most overrun with vermin. The lives 
of the saints are filled with the achievements of these won- 
derful beings who measured their holiness by their filthiness and 
esteemed a bath a temptation of the devil. 

But it does not depend altogether on the religion. The Phar- 
isees were very religious, the most religious class among the 
Jews, the most careful, conscientious, and painstaking in all 
religious duties; and yet they are just the people condemned 
over and over again, and denounced by our Lord, in the bitter- 
ness of divine wrath and indignation, as the worst people in the 
nation. 

It actually seems that a man may be religious even in a re- 
ligion that is true, in a religion ordained minutely by God him- 
self, carefully and conscientiously religious in it, and yet be a 
scoundrel. 

(235) 



236 Religion and Godliness. 

For religion is a set of observances, forms, ceremonies, acts 
of worship more or less elaborate, which, if the religion be a 
true one, are intended to bring a man into contact with eternal 
verities, with the everlasting laws of God and the everlasting 
duties of God's rational creatures, which are to keep the sense 
and consciousness of these present in his mind and heart and 
powerful in his life, and help him to their fulfilment. 

And yet it is possible that religious observances may become 
to him, under certain circumstances, the whole. They may end 
with themselves; they may blind him to their purpose; they 
may hide from him the very things they were given to reveal 
and intensify. He may stop in the semblance and forget the 
reality. He may be intensely religious, and yet utterly unright- 
eous, as were the Pharisees. 

This, we say, may be the case when the religion is even true 
and divine. 

" Thou desirest no sacrifice ; else would I give it thee : but 
thou delightest not in burnt offerings. The sacrifice of God is 
a troubled spirit." Here the psalmist distinguishes between 
the two, which men so often confound — religion and godliness. 
The religion, too, was a divine one, a true one. God himself 
established the burnt offering, and yet the inspired singer dares 
to say that he delighted not in that which he himself had com- 
manded. Inspired by the Spirit, he saw the difference between 
the reality and its shadow, between the arbitrary institution of 
a religion and the godliness that religion was given to teach 
and sustain. 

There could be no more minutely ordered religion than that 
of the Hebrews ; none could be more uncompromisingly bound 
on conscience. It was ordered and bound by God himself. 
And yet the burden of our Lord's teaching is that this religion 
had been so wrested from its purpose, so taken to be all, so 
dwelt in as a finality in itself, that the men who were most 
religious among the Hebrews were the men who were the worst ; 
that the very outcasts, the professed and acknowledged irreli- 
gious, were nearer the kingdom of heaven than they! Their 



Religion and Godliness. 237 

religion in our Lord's day had actually become a barrier be- 
tween them and God. They had settled down in it as the sum 
of human duty, and being religious men, they were content to 
be godless and unrighteous men. 

In view of common opinion it is startling to read the New 
Testament. For the tendency is a perpetual one to confound 
religion and godliness ; to mistake certain arbitrary and symbolic 
duties for the real duties they are intended to teach and press 
and keep alive ; to accept the doing of them as a sort of com- 
promise for the neglect of plain moralities. 

We are not even, as Christians, free from the danger of con- 
founding religion with righteousness and godliness. We are 
ready to acknowledge they are confounded by some who are 
called Christians. We are ready to point to devout Romanists, 
very careful in the performance of their religious duties, regular 
at mass and devoted to the saints, who are profane drunken 
ruffians nevertheless, who are just as "religious," and hate 
heretics just as bitterly in the State-prison as out of it; but 
we are apt possibly to pass by the fact that we are ourselves 
exposed to the same danger of mistaking religiousness for right- 
eousness. 

And yet it is one of the world's charges against the Church 
that this mistake is common, that a man's religiousness is no 
necessary proof of his integrity or his uprightness. The charge 
may be made too broadly, too recklessly, and yet, we must con- 
fess, it is not a charge which has no show of reason. 

Christianity is less of a religion and more of a godliness than 
any religion given to men or devised by men. The only positive 
institutions of a religion established by its founder are Baptism 
and the Lord's Supper. Beyond these the whole as a religion 
was left to the Church of each age. It differs in this respect 
broadly from the minute and careful institutions of Judaism. 
It seems as if the purpose were godliness and righteousness, 
clear and plain, and religiousness were to be kept in the back- 
ground ; as if, at all events, religiousness were hereafter to be kept 
as the handmaid and helper, distinctly and confessedly, of these. 



238 Religion and Godliness. 

How much of ceremonial, how much of symbolic teaching, 
how much of arbitrary observance, may be wise as helps to 
godliness and righteousness — how much of religiousness may be 
profitable— seems to have been left to the wisdom of the living 
body actually at work in every age. But because it is much 
more easy to be religious than to be godly, because man is na- 
turally religious and by no means naturally godly, it has come 
to pass, as some have thought, that in certain times religiousness 
has been exaggerated to take the place of godliness almost as 
much as it did in the old Judaism. 

Therefore there have been rebellions against religion. We 
should be very unfair to say they were rebellions against godli- 
ness. It has been claimed that they were in the interests of 
godliness, against an arbitrary religion which overlaid godliness. 
The very communion to which we belong made its own protest, 
and made it in the interest, as it claimed, of godliness. 

That England before the Reformation was more religious than 
England since is a thing that cannot be questioned. The ques- 
tion whether it was more godly ', more righteous, is quite a different 
question. Constantinople is vastly more religious than New 
York. Paris is much more religious than London. Rome, at 
least before Victor Emmanuel came, was the most religious city 
in Christendom. By all accounts it was also the dirtiest, the 
most wicked, and the most criminal city. Mexico is a much 
more religious city than Philadelphia, and Naples vastly more 
devoted to its religious duties than Brooklyn. 

The Reformation, among other things, was a protest against 
a religion which had taken the place of godliness, righteousness, 
and clean living. Christianity is too clearly a teaching of god- 
liness to allow men to be satisfied long with a religiousness that 
claims its place ; and therefore, more or less wisely, Christian 
men protested against a sham and a delusion which under the 
name of religion was destroying the purposes of religion, deny- 
ing the only reason that any religion has to exist on earth. 

In some cases the protest was made to the extent of scouting 



Religion and Godliness. 239 

all religion whatever. The Puritan went far on the road, but 
the consistent Quaker went to the end, and in his love for godli- 
ness and righteousness left himself no " religion " but a broad- 
brimmed hat, a comical coat, and an outrage on the English 
language. 

The Church, we claim, was wiser. She recognized the wants 
of human nature, and provided, as she had the right to do, a 
"religion" for men, — observances, forms, symbols, worship, — 
because man is naturally religious, and through his religious in- 
stincts godliness, righteousness, and truth may be taught him. 

We have not lived up to our "religion"; that is very true. 
There is scarce a parish in the land that comes up to the mea- 
sure of the "religion " laid down in the Prayer-book. Generally 
three fourths of our "religion," as laid down in that book, is 
quietly passed by. 

It is a question whether we have not thereby lost power in 
teaching godliness. The "religion " itself is of no consequence. 
Its value depends on the results it reaches. The purpose of 
the whole is to get men to keep the Ten Commandments — " to 
live quiet and peaceable lives, in all godliness and honesty." 

If we are doing this it makes small difference whether our 
saints' days are all observed or not. We have close examples 
of a religion that keeps all the saints' days by the dozen and yet 
fails in "the quiet and peaceable lives," in "the godliness and 
honesty." But if we are not doing this — and there is good ground 
to believe we should succeed better by being more strictly re- 
ligious, — then we have good reason for trying. 

But one thing we should not, we churchmen, at this late day 
forget. We should not make the blunder of supposing that 
religion is godliness ; that devotion to religious duties necessarily 
means honesty, uprightness, and piety ; that the temptation of 
all ages has ceased to be a temptation in ours ; and that there 
is no danger of our eagerly grasping the means and, having once 
possessed them, being utterly forgetful of the end. 



COMMON SENSE NEEDED. 

T I 7E have just been reading a sketch of the history of a promi- 
VV nent parish eastward. Among other matters, we noticed 
that at one time this parish had " a glebe of one hundred acres." 
It was given it by some large-minded Christian gentleman who 
had common sense, and who also believed that common sense 
is a very desirable quality in religious matters. He used his 
common sense as well as his liberality, and either gave or secured 
a good tract of land for the church. 

But the church was a "parish," a corporation of individuals, 
that is, who wished to provide for themselves and their children 
the ministrations of religion according to the rites and ceremo- 
nies of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The property of the 
parish was entirely in the hands of these people, to use for 
their own convenience in making such provision. Consequently 
one day it seemed to these people convenient to sell the glebe, 
and they sold it. The parish has now ground enough for its 
church to stand on, and possibly a parsonage with a few square 
feet in the rear which the house does not cover, and its glebe 
could not now be bought for as many thousands as the tens it 
sold for. 

This sort of thing is occurring, more or less regularly, all the 
time, and one wonders whether the common sense and business 
sagacity of men desert them at once as soon as they set about 
dealing with church property and religious interests. 

Again and again we see such absolute lack of foresight, such 
shiftless imprudence, such utter absence of common sense, in 

(240) 



Common Sense Needed. 241 

our management in this respect, as sets us in despair. Look at 
it in a new city. The church building covers every square inch 
that belongs to the parish! There is not a foot of ground to 
extend upon. When a new church is built the parish will have 
to pay perhaps twenty thousand dollars for a site. And yet 
when the present church was erected an acre might have been 
secured for one or two hundred dollars! There is no parson- 
age, and no ground on which to build one ; no parish school- 
house, and no place to erect one. The parish has allowed its 
opportunities to drift by. It has never exercised common sense 
or decent business discretion. It has secured no property for 
any future. It has lived from hand to mouth, so to speak ; has 
been content if it had a roof to cover its congregation on Sun- 
days ; and has been utterly faithless to its stewardship in making 
any provision for church growth in the time to come. 

The experience is the same in all cities in the country, but it 
is a more present and mortifying experience in our new Western 
towns. 

In many of them to-day a committee may go to inquire the 
price of a desirable site for a church which is to be erected, and 
when the price is mentioned, in any sum from one thousand to 
fifty thousand dollars, more than one member of the committee 
can say, " I remember when I could have purchased a block 
here for one hundred dollars ! " Meanwhile, the church build- 
ing sits on its narrow little strip of earth. There was an empty 
world about it when it was built. A few dollars more would 
have secured an entire block. A few hundred more would have 
secured ground for parsonage, for school, for chapel, and for 
an enlarged church, for some neat grounds and tree space, also, 
about the whole. But shiftlessness ruled the management. 
" Hand to mouth " was the principle ; and now to get this room 
would cost, not by the tens, but by the tens of thousands. 

The curious thing about the whole matter is that the men 
who have used so little foresight and common sense in church 
business have showed no lack of those qualities in their own. 



242 Common Sense Needed. 

They are not left, by any means, without ground to stand on. 
They did not fail to pick out and secure a desirable corner lot 
here and a choice building site there. Some of them have 
picked the city over with a good deal of shrewdness. When 
land was going a-begging they were by no means asleep, and 
to-day they enjoy the rewards of foresight and business enter- 
prise, and are happy to pay taxes for some of the most desir- 
able property in a thriving city. 

It is well understood that, as a rule, in all Western cities, 
villages, and country, land is yearly increasing in value. At the 
start in an empty country there is plenty of room and land is 
cheap ; to buy, then, in the beginning, is, as a rule, a good in- 
vestment. There are exceptions, but we state the rule. 

Now, the clear duty of a parish in such a new city or village 
is to secure land enough for its needs ; not for its present needs 
only, but for its future. It should look for the time when it 
will have a much larger church, when it will have a parsonage 
house, and when it will need a school. For all these, at least, 
if common sense is used in its management, it will try to pro- 
vide room. Ground enough merely for its church will not 
satisfy it. A lot or two, more or less, will cost very little. In- 
deed, half the time they will be given for the asking ; a few 
hundred feet in the beginning is a matter of small consequence. 
In the whole vast spaces which are empty there is no need of 
being crowded. 

This, we say, would seem to be common sense and ordinary 
discretion. It would be the sort of sense and discretion used 
by a man in his private affairs. Why should he not bring them 
to bear also in church affairs when he comes to act in them? 
In many cases, in most, indeed, when a few years pass away the 
exercise of such foresight reveals its wisdom. The parish has 
a valuable property ; it has room for growth ; its church site is 
made attractive and stands prominent in a rapidly spreading 
city. If its site is a good one for a church, it is more than good 
if it is beautiful and delightful, a bit of greenery, peace, and 



Common Sense Needed. 243 

quiet and shade in the crowded streets. If it is not a good site 
longer for a church, if business streets are encroaching on it, 
and it is necessary or desirable to remove, it is a large and val- 
uable property, whose sale makes removal and purchase else- 
where very easy. 

We wish anything we could say would have effect in the new 
parishes which are setting to work in our new cities. We could 
call their attention to nothing more important than this matter 
in regard to their temporal prosperity. We would warn them 
by the sad blindness and short-sightedness of our older parishes. 
A little forethought, a little effort, will secure them now a per- 
manent position. Narrow-mindedness, shiftlessness, at the 
present will embarrass them in the time to come. Breathing 
room is what they want — room to grow, ground on which to 
spread. Let them be content with a less costly church; let 
them spare something in ornament or show now, and secure 
ground, — another hundred feet on this side or that, a whole 
block, if possible, — which will tell when they come hereafter to 
build a church which will be permanent. 

We confess, however, to little faith that our parishes will use 
common sense in this matter. The experience of the past is not 
encouraging. Parishes as they are organized among us are only 
congregations, and their tendency is to look after themselves and 
leave the questions of the future to the men of the future. The 
congregation, or, as we call it still, the parish, has no interest in 
doing more than providing for the wants of the day. Conse- 
quently lands in the hands of our vestries have generally been 
got rid of as fast as possible. There is little encouragement for 
the vestry of to-day to secure " a glebe of one hundred acres," 
or even a block of ground, where the vestry of ten years here- 
after may sell it to buy a melodeon or pay the organ-blower! 

It is evident that common sense in this business must be in- 
troduced by the bishops and conventions. The bishop can 
advise parishes ; the convention can call attention to this matter. 
Some diocesan corporation can be formed to obtain, if possible, 



244 Common Sense Needed. 

and hold, lands in city or country for church purposes and for 
church endowment. To such a corporation, acting for the 
diocese, a man could pass over a lot here or an acre there with 
some reasonable assurance that it would not be sold out to pay 
the salary of Mademoiselle Squallina, the soprano singer, in some 
collapse in the parish treasury. 

But however it may be brought about and by whatever agency, 
it is a very desirable thing that this piece of common sense 
should be introduced into the Church, and that at the present 
day, when lands are so cheap and so easily procured in the 
country everywhere, and especially in the West, there should be 
room secured for future needs. 

This wretched, poverty-stricken way in which we act in taking 
possession of the country open before us is a shame and disgrace 
to us as a Church, and is treason to the Lord's cause committed 
to our hands. The Church is embarrassed, hampered, and her 
growth retarded because there is no faith and no foresight to 
lay foundations for the future. Grand churches may be safely 
left to the future. Land on which to build them is what should 
be secured in the present. 



THE WORKS OF 

Hugh Miller Thompson 

BISHOP OF MISSISSIPPI 



THE WORLD AND THE LOGOS. The Bedell Lectures 

for 1885. Square 121110, cloth, $1.00. 

"Asa superb piece of dialectic, as a capital example of good fighting-, 
this little book will be a real enjoyment." — The Churchman. 

THE WORLD AND THE KINGDOM. The Bishop 
Paddock Lectures for 1888. Fifth Edition. i2mo, 
cloth, 75 cents. 

" To say that these lectures are admirable is saying but little — they 
are more ; they are eloquent, forceful and convincing. Their lines of 
argument are well laid, and the reader lays the finished volume down 
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" It is one of the suggestive books of the day, not because of any new 
theories or startling statements, but because of the clear, keen way of 
putting much that is commonplace." — Public Opinion. 

THE WORLD AND THE MAN. The Baldwin Lectures 

for 1890. Fourth Edition. i2mo, cloth, $1.25. 

A series of brilliant lectures in continuation of the line of thought in 
the above volumes. The titles of the several lectures are : The Out- 
look, Led Up, Tempted, Bread, Kingdoms, The Law of the Case, The 
End. The book is unusually vigorous and refreshing. 

THE WORLD AND THE WRESTLERS: Personality 

and Responsibility. The Bohlen Lectures for 1895. 
i2mo, cloth, $1.00. Just out. 

ABSOLUTION. In the Light of Primitive Practice. 

Second Edition. i2mo, cloth, 50 cents. 
" COPY." Essays from an Editor's Drawer on Religion, 

Literature and Life. Fourth Edition. i2mo, paper, 

50 cents; cloth, $1.50. 



* * 



Copies of any of the above sent post-paid on receipt of price 



THOMAS WH1TTAKER 
2 and 3 Bible House NEW YORK 



The Gospel and the Age Series. 

Large 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50 per volume. 

I. THE GOSPEL AND THE AGE. Sermons on Special 
Occasions. By the late Wm. Magee, D.D., Archbishop 
of York. 
" Will arrest the attention of the world." — Spectator. 

2. GROWTH IN GRACE. And other Sermons. By the 
late Wm. Magee, D.D., Archbishop of York. 

' ' The sermons in this volume show us the Archbishop at his very- 
best. ' ' — Guardian. 

3. CHRIST THE LIGHT OF ALL SCRIPTURE. And 

other Sermons. By the late Wm. Magee, D.D., Arch- 
bishop of York. 
' ' We give to this volume an unusually earnest recommendation, especially 
to the clergy. Such sermons as these are invaluable. "-Literary Churchman. 

4. THE INDWELLING CHRIST. And other Sermons, 
by the late Henry Allon, D.D., of Islington. 

"Worthy to take their place among the masterpieces of the old 
divines." — Daily Telegraph. 

5. CHRIST AND SOCIETY. And other Sermons. Bythe 
Rev., Donald Macleod, D.D., Chaplain to the Queen. 

' ' Will do much to advance the consideration of great social questions 
on right lines." — Rock. 

6. THE CHRISTIAN CERTAINTIES. Discourses in Ex- 
position and Defence of the Christian Faith. By John 
Clifford, D.D. 

"On the ethical and social aspects of religion Dr. Clifford speaks with 
great freshness and impressiveness." — Star. 

7. CHRIST AND ECONOMICS. In the Light of the Ser- 
mon on the Mount. By the Rev. C. W. Stubbs, M.A. 

"Full of the social teachings which the age most requires." — Inquirer. 

8. CHRIST AND OUR TIMES. By W. MacDonald Sin- 
clair, D.D., Archdeacon of London, Canon of St. Paul's. 

9. LABOR AND SORROW. By the Rev. W. J. Knox- 
Little, M.A. 

10. CHRIST AND SKEPTICISM. By the Rev. S. A. 
Alexander, M.A., of the Temple Church. 

11. THE COMRADE CHRIST. And other Sermons. By 
W. J. Dawson, M.A., author of the " Threshold of 
Manhood." 



THOMAS IHITTAKER, 2 & 3 Bible House, Hew York. 



Buried Cities and Bible Countries 

By GEORGE ST. CLAIR, F.G.S. 

Member of the Society of Biblical Archaeology ; Member of the Anthropological 
Institute, and ten years Lecturer for the Palestine Exploration Fund 

Svo, 378 pages, with Maps and Illustrations. Price, §2.00 

"As a lecturer for the Palestine Exploration Fund, Mr. George St. 
Clair has had special opportunity and occasion to get correct information, 
and his book has the great recommendation of being trustworthy in its 
statements of recent discoveries." — The Nation. 

" We desire to call the attention of all Bible students to a book whose 
iisefulness can hardly be overstated. The title is ' Buried Cities and 
Bible Countries,' by George St. Clair, F.G.S. Some notion of its 
character and value may be gained by mention of points of the account. 
The Rosetta Stone and its bearing on the solution of Egyptian hiero- 
glyphics, the discovery of the mummies of Seti I., Rameses II., and 
Manephta I., who were Pharoahs of the Israelite bondage ; the relation 
of the Tellel-Amarna inscription ; the early history of the Semites, 
Biblical sites in Egypt ; the route of Exodus ; the fate of Sodom and 
Gomorrah ; results of the Palestine explorations in Jerusalem and else- 
where, as throwing light upon, not the Old Testament alone, but the 
Gospels also ; the excavations on the sites of Nineveh and Babylon. 
These are some of the topics which are treated in a vigorous and trust- 
worthy fashion. To each section is appended a set of references to the 
best authorities ; excellent illustrations and maps enrich the pages. We 
find it clear as well as carefully condensed ; in short, a very valuable 
book, surprisingly complete for its size, since in some three hundred and 
eighty pages it gives the gist of many large and costly volumes. " 

— The Christian Union. 

"It would be difficult to overstate the value of this book as a brief 
resume of the rich results of recent explorations in Bible lands. The 
references to authorities are full and accurate, and the maps are very 
fine." — Public Opinion. 

1 ' Mr. St. Clair has given us in this book a carefully and conscientiously 
written volume on a subject of the deepest interest to all Biblical readers. 
His connection with the Palestine Exploration Fund has enabled him to 
know thoroughly all about the subject on which he writes, and he has 
evidently determined to bring forth nothing for which he cannot give 
good and convincing authority." — The Churchman. 

"Mr. St. Clair has given us an interesting, readable, and also an 
accurate book, which will prove of great interest to all Bible students 
as well as to archaeologists." — Biblia. 

" A score or more of illustrations assist the text, which may be pro- 
nounced one of the most judicious and accurate popular presentations 
thus far made of the results of excavation in Bible lands." 

— Boston Literary World. 

THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 and 3 Bible House, NEW YORK 



CURIOSITIES OF OLDEN TIMES 

By S. BARING-GOULD, M.A. 

12mo, Maroon Cloth. 30 1 Pages. Price, $ 1 .50 

CONTENTS 

1. The Meaning of Mourning. 2. Curiosities of Cypher. 3. Strange 
Wills. 4. Queer Culprits. 5. Ghosts in Court. 6. Strange Pains and 
Penalties. 7. What are Women Made Of? 8. " Flagellum Salutis." 
9. " Hermippus Redivivus." 10. The Baroness de Beausoleil. 11. 
Some Crazy Saints. 12. The Jackass of Vanvres. 13. A Mysterious 
Vale. 14. King Robert of Sicily. 15. Sortes Sacrae. 16. Chiapa 
Chocolate. 17. The Philosopher's Stone. 



" Mr. Baring-Gould's ' M.A.' might, by a free translation, be ren- 
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institution from which he obtained it — for he has filled his book with 
that which at all times will be found to be a panacea for the most desperate 
and prolonged fit of the blues imaginable. His collection indicates great 
research and a discriminating mind; also an ability to retell in a pleasing 
and trouble-dispelling manner stories that few are acquainted with, but 
which all must take an interest in when they have an opportunity to 
become acquainted with them." — New York Times. 

" The volume as a treasury of antiquarian lore is one of rare interest. 
The author in his peculiar field of research has few superiors." 

— The Advertiser. 

"Pure amusement, but of a high and recondite character. A 
repertory of the oddest and drollest articles imaginable, from which it is 
hard to break away until the whole store has been examined." 

The Guardian, London. 

" He takes his reader away out of the ruts of the ordinary life and 
the tracks of ordinary thought, into a realm in which both sense and 
nonsense are deliciously mingled. We hardly know whether his 
' Curiosities ' are better adapted to the amusement of people who have 
little to do or the recreation of people whose good fortune it is to have 
more than enough to do." — The Church Standard. 

"The wit which enlivens these curious stories is not their least 
recommendation," — The Bookman. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 and 3 Bible House, - - - NEW YORK 



One Thousand and One Anecdotes 

Illustrations, Incidents, Episodes, Yarns, 
Stories, Adventures, Practical Jokes, 
Witticisms, Epigrams and Bon Mots, 
gathered from all sources, old and 
new, for the use of public speakers 
and others. Arranged and edited by 

ALFRED H. MILES 

12mo, Cloih - Price $1.50 



SOME COMMENTS 

" It is a book to interest all classes of readers, and in every mood 
from grave to gay. It is a neatly printed volume in clear type." 

— The Inter-Ocean, Chicago. 

" Mr. Miles deserves great credit. Diners-out and society raconteurs 
should welcome with fervent enthusiasm the publication of this book." 

— The Daily Telegraph, London. 

This volume is sure to be found useful to several classes of public 
speakers and to be prized by them. As a piece of good presswork it 
leaves nothing to be desired." — The Living Church. 

" The stories are gathered from all sources, old and new, and, if the 
old predominate, we can recall that ' a good story bears repetition.' 
Our choice is practically unlimited — famed wits, musicians, players, 
preachers, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, printers, misers, rogues, and 
royalty, all contribute their quota to our amusement, and a cursory 
glance at the excellently classified index will suffice to show how much 
one gets in prospect for their money. It ought to prove an excellent 
gift for the solitary man addicted to melancholy." — The Public Ledger. 

" Of Mr. Miles' collection as a whole one may say that it contains 
little that is not really good and a great deal that is excellent. As a 
volume for occasional reading in moments of leisure or as an antidote to 
attacks of the blues, it offers very manifest advantages. A by no means 
minor attraction of the volume is to be found in the clear and handsome 
typography which has been given to it by the publishers." 

— The Beacon, Boston. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 and 3 Bible House NEW YORK 



ft 



Christ and Modern Unbelief." 

By Rev. RANDOLPH H. McKIM, D.iX, 

Rector of Epiphany Church, Washington, D. C. 
12mo, in cloth, i^rice, 31.00. 




CONTENTS: 

LECTURE I. The Citadel and its Defence. II. The Theistic 

Foundation. III. The Unique Personality of Christ. IV. 

The Plan and the Teaching of Christ. V. The Work of 

Christ. VI. Miracles. VII. Theories of the Resurrection. 

From RT. REV. THOS. F. GAILOR, D,D., Assistant Bishop of 

Tennessee. 

"At first I said to myself 'Is there any need for another book on 
this subject?' But when I read it I was delighted. You have really 
supplied a felt need and I have recommended the book to my students, 
as a fresh, clear and able presentation in convenient form of the modern 
problem — with very admirable survey of the Christian argument." 

From MR. JAMES L. HOUGHTELING, President of the Council 
of St. Andrew's Brotherhood. 

" I have this moment finished the perusal of your book ' Christ and 
Modern Unbelief.' I write to thank you with all my heart. I thank 
you first in my own behalf. I have been confused alike by the assaults 
of foes and the defences of friends. . . . You have met my difficul- 
ties squarely and have disavowed arguments which have seemed to me 
untenable. I deem your argument conclusive. It is so to me at any 
rate, and I believe the book will be of great use." 

From REV. EDWARD WHITE, M.A., author of " Life in 

Christ." 
" I don't know where I have seen the things requisite to be said in 
the present distress, better put, or in a briefer and more logical form." 

THOMAS YYHITTAKER, 

2 & 3 Bible House, oth St. and Fourth Ave., New York. 



SOME MODERN SUBSTITUTES 
FOR CHRISTIANITY. 

By George Wolfe Shinn, D.D. i2mo, paper 
cover, 25 cents; cloth, 50 cents. 

A popular consideration of the claims of Theosophy, 
Christian Science, Spiritualism, Socialism, and Agnosti- 
cism, and of the reasons for declining to accept any one 
of these systems as a substitute for Christianity. A timely 
book to read and circulate widely. 

' ' Such a book ought to do good in quarters where more elaborate 
treatises on these subjects would not be read. Its tone is scrupulously 
courteous and fair." — Providence Journal, 

"Ina brief and clearway the author presents Theosophy, Spiritual- 
ism, Agnosticism, Christian Science, and Socialism as modern rivals of 
Christianity. The claims of each are exhausted and the points of contrast 
with Christianity clearly set forth. This makes the book of value. As 
a rule, nothing is needed but a clear comprehension of what these notions 
really are to see their absurdity. Dr. Shinn does this well." 

— Christian Index. 

" The treatment of these various forms of error is courteous, but 
the author shows clearly and forcibly that none of these can be accepted 
as a substitute for Christianity. It is a strong defence of the truth 
against these modern ' isms.' " — Christian Observer. 

"'Some Modern Substitutes for Christianity' deals lucidly but 
strenuously with the alleged claims of Theosophy, Spiritualism, Agnos- 
ticism, and other modern 'isms.' The several discourses, while short, 
are clear, direct, and strong." — Christian Advocate, 

" The author, cleverly and fairly, makes all things plain that are 
held and taught in these false systems, in six compact chapters, one for 
each, following a chapter as preliminary, on ' What we are asked to give 
up, and what do they offer in place of it?' " — The Living Church. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher, 
2 and 3 Bible House, New York. 



FROM THINGS TO COD, 

By DAVID H. GREER, D.D., 

Rector of St. Bartholomew's Church, New York. i2mo, 
clot»h, price $1.50. 

' ' Dr. Greer vindicates in this volume his title to the reputation of 
being one of the foremost preachers in New York. His work is simple, 
but it is great." — The Boston Herald. 

" He is never without something to say which is worth saying, and 
he knows how to say it. His sermons display the acumen of a student 
and scholar, as well as the genial spirit of a true Christian." — The A T ew 
York Times. 

" They are like stepping-stones from earth to heaven, from the world 
to God. Sermons so uplifting and so helpful in the development of 
spiritual life and religious character should always be within the reach of 
those who strive to walk before God in truth and righteousness." — The 
Home Journal. 



ROYAL HELPS 

For Loyal Living. By Martha Wallace Richardson, 
i8mo, cloth, red edges, $1.00; white and gold (boxed), 

$1.25. 

' ' A collection of prose and poetical selections arranged as a calendar. 
A text of Scripture, a stanza of verse and two or three quotations from 
standard authors occupy each page. The book has been compiled by 
Martha Wallace Richardson, who displays a truly catholic appreciation 
of wisdom wherever found. Dr. Furness, Dean Stanley, Archdeacon 
Farrar, E. E. Hale, Saint Augustine, Jeremy Taylor, Fenelon and 
Cardinal Manning, Theodore Parker and H. W. Beecher, Martin Luther 
and Emerson, are cited in this cabinet counselor." — Public Ledger. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

PUBLISHER, 

2 and 3 Bible House, NEW YORK, 



By IE BOYD CARPENTER, D.D. 



Lord Bishop of Ripon. 



The Son of Man among the Sons of Men 

Studies in some New Testament Characters. i2mo, cloth 
$1.50. 

"A dozen discourses on New Testament characters — Herod, Pilate 
Judas, Peter, Thomas, Bartimus, etc. — in which keen analysis, large 
familiarity with human nature, practical good sense and devout piety all 
blend effectively. The sermons are fresh, strong and impressive. 

— The Congregationalist. 

"We have here a series of character studies. Herod, Pilate, Judas 
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others, are each made the subject of a separate discourse. The frank and 
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for the lay reader." — The Churchman. 

"Good sermons are not quite so 'plentiful as blackberries.' We 
wish they were. Nevertheless, it falls to one's lot now and then to meet 
with excellent volumes of discourses. Recently we called attention to a 
capital volume from the pen of Dr. Greer, preached to a cultured New 
York congregation. Now we are permitted to match it with a volume 
containing twelve sermons by an English bishop of high reputation as a 
preacher." — N. Y. Times. 

" This volume shows two qualities requisite in the great preacher, re- 
markable acquaintanceship with human nature and profound study of the 
sacred text. It seems to utter this beatitude : Blessed is the man who 
can read the Greek Testament, so as to see men not always walking like 
trees in the language, which is often made wooden in order to keep it 
sacred for the multitude, and who can recognize actual talk, and so trans- 
late as to get at the bottom facts, and this without triviality or irrever- 
ence unto edification." — The Critic. 

The Great Charter of Christ. 

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 

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its quality has been already appraised. His mastery of choicest English 
is apparent, and his profound sympathy with living men is manifest. In 
his preaching he is one of the most unconventional of men, yet, withal, 
truly devout. He has a keen eye upon the reality of things, and, as 
an Englishman, delights in stripping off the crusts of prejudice in which 
the insular Churchman does so love to encase himself." — The Critic. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher, 

2 and 3 BIBLE HOUSE, - ~ NEW YORK. 



CIVIC CHRISTIANITY 

BY THE 

Rev. WILLIAM PRALL, S.T.D., Ph.D. 

Rector of St. Joh n's Church, Detroit, Mich. 



12 mo, cloth binding - Price, $1.00 



Contents : — I. The Marks of the Messiah. II. Christ and the Multi- 
tudes. III. The Alienation of the Masses. IV. The Education of 
the Young. V. The Prevention of Crime and the Reformation of 
Criminals. VI. "Common Honesty." VII. The Sin of Gossip. 
VIII. Good Citizenship. IX. Good Government. X. The Social 
Evil and the Low Saloon. XI. The Cross the Resolvent of Diffi- 
culties. XII. No Vision, No People. 



u Too many sermons cannot be preached upon these topics. A great many people 
■will think that Dr. Prall is entirely wrong in considering ' the Cross the resolvent of 
difficulties,' but no one can doubt the value of good sharp talk on clean government, 
from the pulpit, and in just such volumes as this." — N. Y. Recorder. 

" These sermons show the line along which social regeneration should move." 

— The Journal, Boston. 

"Dr. Prall, who is rector of St. John's Church, at Detroit, Mich., finds the marks 
of Messiahship in the direction of earnest, effective effort for the education and eleva- 
tion of the masses. The Christianity that counts for anything nowadays is the Chris- 
tianity that makes for the suppression of vice, the rescue of young children from toil 
and degradation, the maintenance of equal rights between capital and labor, the 
establishment of proper sanitary conditions, the purification of politics — the securing, 
in a word, of those conditions that make men and women happier and better and more 
useful citizens by making them healthy in mind and body." — The Boston Beacon. 

" Here are no glittering generalities or sentimental suavities to amuse or edify 
the people ; but a discussion of important and practical subjects — subjects which are 
to-day stirring the hearts and minds of the world's thinkers." — Public Opinion. 

" Fine flashes of scorn and wit, as from a rough diamond, light up the dark places 
into which these researches enter, and there is plenty of fact for the hard-headed 
statistician as well as moral inspiration for the optimistic reformer." — The Bookman. 

" A careful reading of this book will help any man who is working and praying 
for social and national righteousness." — St. A ndrew's Cross. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 and 3 Bible House NEW YORK 



THE WORKS OF 

Rev. ROBERT EYTON, D.D 

(The Successor to Dr. Farrar, at St. Margaret's, Westminster) 



SERMONS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED. i2mo, cloth, 

$I.OO. 

SERMONS ON THE LORD'S PRAYER. i 2 mo, cloth, 

$I.OO. 

SERMONS ON THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. i2mo, 

cloth, $1.00. 

SERMONS ON THE BEATITUDES. i2mo, cloth, $1.00. 

PRESS NOTICES 

" Mr. Eyton has evidently a great admiration for the late Dr. 
Phillips Brooks, whom in spirit he resembles. These sermons are as 
stimulating- in their positive teaching as they are refreshing in their 
•criticisms." — The Christian World. 

" Canon Eyton's sermons belong to a somewhat different category; 
they are more immediately practical, more concerned to accommodate, 
in no unworthy or time-serving spirit, the things of to-day with the 
things of eternity." — The Times, London. 

" His discourses have in them a freshness, a timeliness, and vigor 
which, in our judgment, entitle them to take first rank in our list. 
They have less of an element which, to our mind, is a very objectionable 
one, and far too prominent in many sermons — an element of sermon 
manufacture. These are very direct, frank, and manly." 

— Literary World. 

" These sermons, however, are sensible, practical, and manly utter- 
ances, full of wholesome teaching and entirely free from sentimentality." 

— The Glasgow Herald. 

' ' Moral courage and ethical fervor distinguish Mr. Eyton's admi- 
rable sermons." — The Speaker. 

" Good churchman, downright preacher, and straight hitter." 

— The Daily News. 

" Canon Eyton's style is by this time well known. He is cultured; 
he has read the best contemporary books; he prepares his sermons 
carefully; and, above all, he always endeavors to keep in contact with 
the facts of life."— The British Weekly. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 and 3 Bible House NEW YORK 



HISTORY 

OF THE 

AMERICAN EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 

FROM THE PLANTING OF THE COLONIES 
TO THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR. 

BY 

S. D. McCONNELL, D.D., 

Rector of St. Stephen's Church, Phila. 

8vo cloth, plain, $2.00 ; with gilt top, $2.25 ; 
in half calf or half morocco, $3.00. 

PRESS NOTICES. 

"The book deserves many commendatory adjectives; for it is 
learned, concise, well proportioned, dispassionate, frank and readable. 
The author usually writes with adequate knowledge of the sources with 
due spiritual insight, with patriotism toward his own Church, and with 
catholic courtesy toward other Churches. Furthermore, he is in accord 
with modern writers in his attention to social development." — Sunday- 
School Times. 

"Without getting into details, it is enough to say that Dr. Mc 
Connell has made easy and sometimes racy reading out of a narrative 
that in less skillful hands would have degenerated into mere chronicle." 
— The Epoch. 

" This is a work creditable alike to scholarship, literary taste, and 
heart of its author." — Bibliotheca Sacra. 

" Those who think that church history must perforce be dull, wilL 
receive a new impression from Dr. McConnell's volume. He applies 
the method of Macaulay and Mc Master, and rivals the vigor and 
vivacity of their style. Nothing which can fitly enliven his pages is 
suppressed, whether it tends to edification or the reverse. He is a 
Churchman, but in no narrow sense. The errors, false policies, and 
failures, of the past are frankly recorded, nor does he scruple to go 
beneath the surface, and trace movements to their sources in ideas. 
There are paragraphs of brilliant analysis, and chapters, as full of 
suggestion as of information." — The Churchman. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

PUBLISHER, 
2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK. 



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